My company finds usability of our products rather important. We are the leader in lifestyle media, and our website, like many others, is paid for in part by ad sales. Higher traffic, the more capital we have to do cool stuff and stay on the leading edge. Usability helps us tweak the designs we come up with so that we may improve the user experience, capture their interest with good content rather than distract them with web design quirks. For example, we realized we needed to animate the splash page of an app because our users were trying to interact with it when the app wasn't loaded.
We have a usability lab, with a few gadgets, and an awesome person who conducts the tests. Eye tracking technology that can stream sessions over the web to remote teams is a really fun way to get other departments involved in the process and make user experience a whole-company priority.