**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
**The fold does not exist.**
There is no universal 'fold line'. Browser and device sizes are too diverse to point to a single point on the screen and say, 'yep, that's where it'll cut off.' The best you can do is say, 'based on the information we've collected about visitors to this particular website, the vertical cut off point will be here for around x% of them.'
Web designers have been gently suggesting for at least five years that the fold never existed in the first place:
If your clients are asking for adverts to be placed above or below "the fold", you have a couple of options:
- Come clean. Tell them that, because of the vast range of devices people are using to access the Web these days, it's impossible to say where the fold will be, but that you can happily put their ad 'higher' or 'lower' on the page and charge them accordingly for the more prominent position.
- Collect visitor data for the website they'll be advertising on and set an 'approximate fold' based on the average visitor's screen resolution. If you're using Google Analytics, look under Visitors > Browser Capabilites > Screen Resolutions to get an idea of where this might be for each site.
What you can say with some certainty is that, the lower you put an ad down the page, the less likely it is to be visible without scrolling. So, while it's impossible to say where the fold is, it's much easier to say where it isn't. Or at least where it's less likely to be. And so it does make sense to charge for ads higher up the page. Just don't sell them on the basis of being above an imaginary line. It's impossible to make a promise like that.