I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense, but there are often good reasons for this.

In the project that I did for another product, we required users to re-enter their payment information to revalidate the account and ensure that the user still had access to the instrument. That process was done to protect the user's instrument.

As I said, I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense and I'm not familiar with their processes to speak with any authority.

In any case, the change and the reason should have been very well documented and messaged to you (we go through a lot of internal user testing even on these mundane processes). If not, please reach out to the consumer operations team, they should be able to resolve your concerns.

I would highly doubt that they dropped everyone's payment information. Think about how much money would be lost from people not willing to overcome the inertia and re-entering their payment info.

It could be that management hopes for that -- due to publishers' inertia AdSense will delay payments them.

I wonder if that delay would improve GOOG Q3 revenue results.

Edit: it seems I guessed incorrect (due to GAAP).

You report revenue and expenses during the quarter in which they were earned, not when they're paid. So a delay in payment wouldn't change their Q3 filings at all.

Beyond this, Google makes a profit from having both sides continue to participate. The more ads they can show, the better. Hampering one side of this equation for temporary gains that only really improve how you look to Wall Street (not how you're actually performing) is silly, and seems completely counter to how Google typically works.

I agree that it does not make sense from long term business perspective.

But then what's left?

I know for sure that my own payment information is gone and it coincided with AdSense system upgrade.

Can anyone with AdSense account share if their payment information is still set?

But even if it's just my payment information lost - it's not a good sign about quality of engineering at AdSense.

That's not how GAAP works.