How to become a Premium Adsense publisher

I am sure many of you have seen those adsense ads that look different than the standard ad format. They blend much better and some folks even have mouse-over effects on their ads. How do they do this? Simple, they are 'Premium' publishers. So how does one get to be a premium publisher? That's a good question!


I recently looked into what it takes to become a premium Adsense publisher. I have googled this and have come up with various answers. Pretty much all of the answers were from those who were not themselves premium publishers. This just begs the question...

So how does one become a premium Adsense publisher?
I got tired of reading guesses from those who don't know and decided to find out the criteria from someone who IS a premium publisher. What did I find?

For starters, NO ONE knows the actual criteria as Google does not disclose this information. In any event I did get a possible answer:

Like all else in the Google "black box," the actual criterial is unknown. ;)

But the consensus is that sites with sustained high traffic, solid AdSense performance, and (likely most important) provides good value to AdWords advertisers eventually get the invitation to be a premium publisher.

In our case, after the 12th month of consistent traffic of more than 1 million absolute unique users, we got the invite. [italics added]

Hope that helps.

Bill

We are currently getting around 7-8 million pageviews a month. So by this right, we have a ways to go! If YOU are a premium publisher I would really like to hear your story and tips if at all possible.

UPDATE: Another great site for information regarding Premium publishers is:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/privilege-of-being-adsense-premium.html