In my humble opinion, I put them on par with pagination of articles (not good).
Of course you click through if you're intrigued enough. I'm not sure carousels are meant to create intrigue about a product. I'm not really sure what their purpose is. Every carousel I've seen has been probably better off being displayed all at once rather than one at a time. This is the Internet, many people (barring disabled/elderly users, who shouldn't be ignored) are used to consuming a lot of data simultaneously, most don't want it fed through a tiny straw.
I see them as a design fad that are typically asked for because someone's friend/competitor has one, or "ooh, ahh" 'ed at by clients who didn't know animation on web pages was possible.
Yeah, this is my typical feeling on it. I think they do have a use case (primarily as an image slideshow for something unimportant like a header image), but they are way overused these days. But, I'm not a designer, so they may know something I don't. I am a user though, and they seem like noise on the page to me, so maybe I know something designers don't, too.
I've been involved with 8-10 medium scale web apps (50-60k visitors/month), and we put analytics on every clickable element. The carousel buttons are maybe only hit by 2-3% of people. We saw conversion rates increase by an average of 4% when we broke that information out into a grid of small screenshots with some basic text for each feature.
Of course you click through if you're intrigued enough. I'm not sure carousels are meant to create intrigue about a product. I'm not really sure what their purpose is. Every carousel I've seen has been probably better off being displayed all at once rather than one at a time. This is the Internet, many people (barring disabled/elderly users, who shouldn't be ignored) are used to consuming a lot of data simultaneously, most don't want it fed through a tiny straw.
I see them as a design fad that are typically asked for because someone's friend/competitor has one, or "ooh, ahh" 'ed at by clients who didn't know animation on web pages was possible.