No offense to ASA, ASA is great as well as some other AdSense people I know, but I'm talking AdSense overall here, the public face of the Google product.
My earliest AdSense experiences with their support people were fandamntastic. Had a serious problem and you could get an actual human to take a look within a few days and get a rapid resolution. I actually had an AdSense rep a few times, but this was a few years ago and eventually they all fade away. Today my emails to AdSense are mostly met with silence, or worse yet, canned answers when I've already read the canned answers or I wouldn't be sending an email in the first place.
The previous level of service standards has definitely slid into the virtual abyss.
Now put this in perspective with the Google Affiliate Network (GAN).
I had resisted signing up with GAN but others were claiming to make some serious coin there so I said what the hell and joined the fray. However, joining the fray and having time to implement all the new ads and stuff is going to take some time since it's a big project. In the meantime, GAN is very aggressive, getting emails with tips for this and that, even a personal email from a consultant!
Wait, a consultant? is that like something like a rep that AdSense used to have?
Maybe it's just because it's something new, maybe it's because I rarely get emails from AdSense (responses or otherwise), but the GAN seems like a whole different beast, a hungry beast, hungry for publishers to get on-board and aggressively going after publisher adoption and implementation.
AdSense tries to hide the payouts per advertiser, hide the list of advertisers to the point it's a real PITA to figure out who's on your site worldwide, good or bad, and is tight-lipped about how much individual advertisers pay. Not the friendliest environment to work with when you're trying to build a business.
Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is just the opposite. GAN tells you who all the advertisers are, exactly how much they pay, and there is no smart-pricing since it's all simple affiliate conversions. Everything you need to know is upfront and transparent.
Now obviously these are two different types of networks with slightly different goals and problems, but if AdSense gave us more support and more information, it's possible we could better tailor performance on the page/site to the types of advertisers being attracted, help seal the deal even better. Sure, it's always possible there would be more attempts at gaming of the system, but it's also possible the overall system could be improved beyond even Google's, and more importantly advertisers, wildest dreams.
AdSense, like GAN, should work more as publisher's partner IMO giving publishers more transparency so we can be even more successful and a lot less of the arms-length adversarial relationship it currently has with many publishers.
