While above the fold placement is still a critical piece of real estate for your website, forcing too many important components into that space can have the opposite desired affect.

The design of any given page is what encourages a user to scroll, rather than a hard rule that users just won't scroll below the fold as often. Generally many older style sites were laid in a way that told the user to not scroll, the least important information was at the bottom. Instead now we see some of the most successful and innovative designs are using story telling or visual cues in the design that drive the user down into the page. With the simplicity of scrolling on tablet and mobile, this idea of scrolling has been further reinforced.

Think about how you use Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or articles with big featured stories. Users are changing, their attention spans are changing, their visual interests are changing. Another indication of this is how much video content is changing the publishing landscape in 2016, 2017 and beyond.

"With enticing content, it seems that we are willing to scroll for as long as it takes. With the introduction of mobile devices this has thrown yet another wrench into the fold argument.”

"You need to follow certain design principles and provide engaging and relevant content to your users to ensure they scroll. After all if you’re not interested, what’s the point?”

"The scroll depth/engagement can vary widely depending on how the elements are positioned on the page.” — suffice to say that if you lay out the page to encourage users to not scroll, they will not scroll generally speaking.

"According to Luke Wroblewski, if you’re assuming the best way to drive conversion is to put big "call to action" buttons above the fold, you’re missing out on the more important point of placing actions where people become convinced to act (this is key). "

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/08/19/why-long-scrolling-sites-have-become-awesome/

http://blog.chartbeat.com/2013/08/12/scroll-behavior-across-the-web/

http://uxmyths.com/post/654047943/myth-people-dont-scroll

http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/

http://www.hugeinc.com/ideas/perspective/everybody-scrolls

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/

http://www.userinsight.com/destroying-the-legend-of-the-fold/

https://pinkpointmedia.com/blog/ux-design/blogux-designblogux-designthe-truth-about-the-fold/

https://arcweb.co/scrolling-and-the-inevitability-of-user-behavior-change/