There was a flood of reports over the weekend by Google AdSense publishers complaining their AdSense earnings was as much as 50% lower than the estimated earnings they were projected to earn for the month of October.
We have threads at WebmasterWorld and Google AdSense Help with complaints of the major earnings difference. Here are some select complaints:
Yes, I just noticed the same for myself. The estimated earning for Oct where on par with how it has been for the past 20-30 months, but the finalized earnings are way lower. Only 56% of the estimated report.
Same here. earnings of $927 and they say finalized earnings of $292
For October i see in Payments an amount with -20% lower than Estimated Earnings. Also, in main interface of Adsense Last Month shows the correct amount (not lowered with -20%).
I personally checked my earnings and they are pretty much the same as my estimated earnings. But there are tons of reports of huge differences between the estimate and actual numbers in the forums.
I have yet to see an official Google response yet.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google AdSense Help.
Update: Google posted this is now a known issue, saying:
We're aware that a number of AdSense publishers are currently seeing significant discrepancies between their estimated and finalized earnings. We're working to identify the cause and resolve this as quickly as possible. We'll provide an update to our Known Issues page within the next 24 hours. Please refer to our Known Issues page for further updates.
The issue is said to be resolved, here are the details:
Details: I am happy to report that this issue has been resolved. It was a syncing issue between our payment system and the account interface which resulted in publishers not properly seeing their earnings and 'Payment issued' line items on the Payments page. For publishers affected by this bug, earnings and payments are now properly displaying and up-to-date. Publisher paid via Western Union can find their MTCN numbers on the Payments page as usual.Publishers who passed the payment threshold in October but have not yet been issued an October payment are affected by the Google Affiliate Network (GAN) problem listed below. Last week we heard from a number of publishers who were unaware that their AdSense accounts were associated with GAN accounts and do not receive regular earnings from GAN. However, all of those accounts have been associated with GAN in our backend system.
