Surprise on the way from the big “G”?

I got a little bit of a surprise last week when I logged in to my Google AdSense account.  I was going there to check my earnings for the day and see which of my ad channels was producing earnings for me.

As many of you who have an AdSense account know, when you log in, you see “Today’s Earnings.”  There is a drop-down menu where you can make other selections.  You can choose to see:

• Today’s Earnings
• Yesterday’s Earnings
• Last 7 days Earnings
• This Month’s Earnings
• Last Month’s Earnings
• Earnings since last payment

Well, last week when I was checking my account, the selections were different.  Everything was the same, except there was no “Earnings since last payment” selection.  Instead, there was an option to see “All-time earnings.”  Wow!  All time?  It caught my attention, so I clicked on it.

It must have taken 2 or 3 minutes to calculate my all-time earnings, and then it gave me a number.  Wow, it was a pretty large number compared to what I’m used to.  I’ve been using AdSense on my sites since September 2006, though, so it’s almost 5 years worth of earnings, which really add up!

I was kind of excited to see this new “all time” earnings on the report.  Not really sure why, but I thought it was kind of neat to be able to track that, although I guess it is not all that useful, only cool.  Still, more information compared to less information is always a good thing, right?  I think it is.

Something funny happened, though.  The all-time earnings were available for the rest of that day.  The next day I logged in to my AdSense account and the all-time earnings option was no longer available, instead, the “since last payment” was back again.

Was Google testing something new?  Will all-time earnings be available soon?  Maybe they tried it and the processing time to calculate the all-time earnings was too long and used too many resources on the server?  I don’t know what happened, but it was something that surprised me while it lasted.

Did you see the “all-time earnings” while it was showing?

Note: Even if the “all time” option does not show up on the menu, you can still check your all-time earnings in the “Advanced Reports” section of AdSense’s Website.