>From my experience people tend to visit the same few sites everyday.

It's a power distribution. They visit their few sites everyday, but they also visit a long tail of sites for different things.

Except if we're talking about Aunt May/Uncle Paul, who only go from their Outlook Mail to Facebook.

Yeah it's the principle of the thing though, when I'm browsing around and constantly getting yelled out (dialog pop ups, etc.) to subscribe to notifications it's really no different than the bad old days of pop ups and pop unders. If a site wants to be a jerk and spam alert dialogs that's fine and they might trick me once but I'll never visit the site again. However with notifications it's junk that every website feels they need to have and is almost unavoidable these days.

But there is no motivation to use alert. There is a huge reward for spammers to get a yes to a notifications prompt, you can then create them even when the browser is closed or when the user is not even on the website. However even so, they are so necessary for applications that this is probably worth it.