Don't know about testing, and nobody will probably ever know.

But there are premium publishers, yes. The entry barrier there is some factor of millions of impressions per month (and probably on a consistent basis, not seasonal)

It wouldn't surprise me if there were some other tiers internal to Google. They have them for support.

Here is what I know from the 2 AdSense accounts I manage. One is a premium publisher; over 200 million page views per month consistently. I have a dedicated account manager for this publisher and I have met with this person, in person, 5 times in the last 2 years. My account manager would love to continue to grow this account because he is financially incentivized to do so. That said, this site has been flagged numerous times in the last 2 years and ads have been turned off by AdSense policy team for over a week both times. The account manager has very little "pull" in getting the ads live again even after we fixed/addressed the policy concern. Also, this site was hit with the Nessie ban so we also do not get the arrows in the text version. On top of that, I believe we get lower quality advertisers, but honestly the CPC prices are pretty good. How that is, frankly I don't know. So this is a site that I know is important to the AdSense Premium Publishers team, but on the "sh*t" list with the policy team. These 2 teams do not have direct access with each other; they don't. AdSense organizationally will make your head spin. I have had this dedicated account manager foe 2 years and I would say 4-5 times a year I will get an email from someone in the same office in CA asking to talk about the account. What can they do to grow it? Do I need anything? I say I'm already working with person A and they always say "Oh he's great - you are lucky he is your account manager". How is there no notes in the account of who my account person is? Why I am constantly getting these calls from people 5 cubicles over? It's the JV team over there.

But while we are ultra premium level, we still don't get a slack on rules and policy or ability not to be exposed from their questionable testing formats, etc. I'd say that tier of publisher are sites that we all know of. Those sites are that big.

Oh I should have also mentioned, that this site also sees the extreme CPC price and RPM fluctuations just as much as a publisher making $50 per month. For example, just compared to March, CPC is down over 20%. In the last 6 months, CPC & RPM fluctuate up and down by double digits every other month. The same 6 months last year were very consistent.

1. Normal Publisher
2. Premium Publisher
3. Adx Access (better split, other tags, geographic rules etc)

There is no change in terms of Smart Pricing.
The custom formats have very little support and usually pays lower than the usual formats.

I had 4 account managers in the last 2 years.
It's chaos...

The ask for more and more ads "optimisation", but they do not have any connections with the Webspam Team, so the Heavy Top page Algo was a blast!

@ Avalon37,

I can't even fathom 200 million pageviews per month. It would be so interesting to see what an account like that looks like, all of the metrics, compared to my measly 100k pageviews per month.

littlecubpanda, it's really not that different the key performance metrics and ads locations, etc. Just imagine your site now with 10-20X the traffic. Anyway, this is a site that I just manage - do not own. Though I certainly wish I did.

Avalon37: Thanks for posting that tidbit. We had some discussion here about sites that earned more than $25 per week (on average) getting more personal treatment. That indicated to some of us that a great man (probably most) sites earn far less than that threshold.

But I would have thought that a site like you describe would have much more pull with Google. And ad managers fighting to place ads on it.

Craig

I would say because of how big one of my sites is I have great access to the best adsense account managers. However, I don't really get any special treatment - nor do I think I should.

I agree that I think there are at least three "tiers" or levels of publishers.

Normal publishers, probably 90% of accounts fall under this.
High publishers, probably 5% of accounts fall under this. They get email and chat support, sometimes an account manager, etc.
Premium publishers, probably less than 5%. They get dedicated account managers, are able to display more than 3 AdSense tags per page, and maybe other stuff?

My site/account falls under High Publisher. Generate 6 digits annually and I've had a number of folks from AdSense and DFP contact me. Also had my tags suspended once and had someone from Google proactively reach out and ask for details.

I do not know what is happening, but Now I have another new Adwords Rep + a brand new tech rep...
Here we go again :(

In Europe at least there are definitely a lot more than 33 tiers. Even if you think about what is public knowledge there are more than three:
1. You're on your own Jack
2. You get email support
3. You get telephone support
4. You get face to face support

My understanding is that these are formal tiers and there are more than that. They don't get you 'favours' just more support.

We were told that we made it to tier 1, which equated to approximately the top 1% of earning publishers. I've never heard Google use the term 'Premium publishers', although know that is a popular term outside of the company.

As a result of being "tier 1" and having certain other skills in house we got invited to become an AdSense Certified Partner. Certified Partners are provide a mechanism to provide some of the same benefits as having a managed account (support, access to specialists, representation, access to premium features, help with policy issues and appeals etc). However this is on a commercial basis rather than as a free extra.

Part of that also means getting to know a bit more about the structure and how things work, but being covered by an NDA - so the above deliberately only references what I knew before becoming a partner.