Many many (although not all) websites these days have tons of extra little interactive crap and games that you can sign up for, participate in, whatever. For instance, if you go to NBC.com and try to watch full a full episode of The Office, you have to wade through a horribly garish page with tons of other interactive material relating to The Office.
Does anyone ever actually pay attention to that stuff? (I mean, I guess at some point someone must, or they wouldn’t go to the effort of making it, assuming they have even the slightest ability to track where website visitors even go… but who does that stuff? And why?)
Similarly, does anyone ever actually look up or follow big corporations (think Proctor and Gamble, for instance) on Facebook or Twitter? Why?
I know this doesn’t answer your question directly, but it might be of interest.
Modern, big budget web sites are usually put through constant testing and adjustment based on user behaviour. On a big site like NBC, the web design team will regularly create experiments and test the responses. Things like “what if we put this button on the left instead of at the top”, or “what if we run an ad at the end of the video instead of at the start”. They’ll run both versions, and test the effect on whatever result they’re trying to achieve (optimizing ad revenue, increasing signups, reducing bounce rates, that sort of thing). See A/B testing for details.
Depending on how the team works, they might run a new test once a month or every day.
In short: not only are you right that some people pay attention to that stuff, their marketing department probably has detailed statistics and experimental results to prove it.
I hate that sort of thing. I pay attention to it, in that it tends to drive me off the site.
I also don’t like reading paper books, magazines, newspapers, and similar things, if they have maggots or ants crawling all over them. Perhaps these preferences are related?
That annoying distracting intrusive garbage is why one of the first things I install on a fresh browser install is Flashblock. For Firefox, NoScript is also quite helpful.