On the other hand, most of this rogues' gallery is digital agencies or sites made by digital agencies. Sadly, those businesses market to unsophisticated customers on the basis of flash and dazzle, and usually any attempt at user advocacy is met with requests for flash and dazzle. The target audience of this kind of site is not the end user who visits the site; it's the manager who signs off on the invoice. Those managers very seldom have long-term engagement growth as an evaluation metric.
Thank you for posting this. I both always wondered what I was thinking about such sites, and also had problems capturing the mindset of the audience when I wanted to make sites like this!
