Feel free to ask an AdWords advertiser about their experiences before parroting this bit about Internet wisdom.

I'm told by contacts inside the Borg that things have gotten better in the last few years -- for example, now you can find a phone number to reach a call center that will /dev/null your ticket for you rather than having to /dev/null it yourself -- but the last few times I needed it having a $X0,000 a year account didn't rate a reply. I'm reliably told that $Y00,000 a month accounts didn't have a transformatively better experience, although, quote, "At least they'll lie to me. It's better than silence. If you collect enough lies you can triangulate off of them."

As a small aside, I think this is the first time I have seen Google referred to as the Borg. That was always Microsoft's title in the slashdot days.

Times have changed.

After having been in this industry for a bit more than 15 years, and having read a lot of history, I'm beginning to suspect that due to the economics of it, there is always going to be a Borg. IBM, Microsoft, Google, and so on.

Anecdotal, but I've had great experience with Google Apps paid support as well as support for our Adwords campaigns (we spend about $40k a year with them on Adwords).

Can you elaborate? What kind of issues you had with GApps and Adwords and what kind of support you got from them?

see my other reply on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837320

I'm not talking about less than $1 million a year account.

If you are directly giving Google money for a service or good, you are their customer.

Fair enough. You are not their priority customer.

Only the NSA fits that category.

This is the right answer. I managed an Adwords campaign that had a spend in the mid to high six figures a year, and we had standing meetings with support every week. I don't like the fact this this is how it works, but I understand the reality.

What do you mean by "standing meetings"?

Likely it means scheduled.

Scheduled meetings, held on a regular basis.

So what you're saying is he should contact the ad team to request a price quote for running an ad for "how do i avoid having google shut down my blog?" :)

This will get a response, not because you are trying to pay Google money, but because you are trying to use the word "google" in an ad. Had an ad for an App Engine related service blocked for a few days until a human could verify that the message containing the word "google" was appropriate.

Well, the advertisers I know have their share of Google complaints as well relating to customer service.

I'm sure if an advertiser spends $10M a month on Google ads, they have someone's cell phone they can call anytime if there are any issue, and that person will "fix" whatever the problem is. These are the Google customers, not the guy who spends $50 a month advertising his self-published book.

The guy who spends $50 on Google's ads is a customer. As is the guy who gives Google page views instead of cash. They are certainly lower priority customers but they are still customers.

If Google wants to treat such low priority customers like non-entities, they are free to do so, but lets not pretend like they should act this way, because they shouldn't. It might be fine for them to do this in the short term, but in the long term it bleeds a lot of good will, which eventually catches up with every company no matter how big.

per https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

Google brought in $12.5B in advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2013, and only $1.2B in non-advertising revenue in the same period.

So, who spent 12 billion in Google ads in 3 months? divide that by 12,000 entities who spent 1 million each per quarter. Or 12,000,000 entities who spent a thousand dollars. Do you think there are enough geeks and small advertisers out there to add up to 4 billion dollars a month? Do you think there are enough small business people out there to make up that? It's the large consumer products that make up the bulk of Google's income: the Ford, GM, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, etc. These are Google's customers.

Google has locked horns with Facebook on getting these advertisers. Yahoo too gets a fair bit of that. These are the Google customers, nobody else. If these advertisers spurn Google, the company will spin out of control. That's in spite of of $56B in cash. They burn 10+ billion a quarter, so they don't have that long to live at full bore, or they would have to cut painfully. They are big enough with so much staff that there's very few sources of income that could replace $12.5 billion a quarter. So you bet they will, hum, accommodate, the Coca-Cola advertising executive's phone calls.

I'm not talking about $50 a month (and that won't get you very far)

I'm talking about $1k to $10k (in orders of magnitude) which, yes, it's not top tier but it's not cheap as well

And yet paying customers of their advertising services... also complain that they can't get support.

With Google, if you're not paying, you're the product. And if you're paying, you're still the product.

I've never paid Google anything, but I was able to quickly get a response to a question regarding YouTube integration last week, almost effortlessly.

Even that's not true though. When I was consulting, and even now at my current company, I dealt with multiple people who were needed support for a number of reasons (ads not displaying being the biggest). They'd get absolutely nothing back, and then maybe a couple of months later things would just start working again.