MSN Adcenter – First Impressions

I mentioned MSN adcenter a while back when Microsoft did a “soft launch”.
At the time I had IE7 beta installed on my windows desktop and found that I couldn’t access the signup page.
I’ve since dumped IE7 due to issues with various online services and so I decided to have a look at what all the fuss was about.
Signing up costs a one-time activation fee of 5 euro. The signup process is quite painless, though a bit contradictory, as it states that your email address has to be validated, but then does not actually do anything to verify it…
The interface is very clean and has nicely tabbed menus:

Of course the section I’m most interested in is setting up an actual ad, so as a seasoned adwords user I was pleasantly surprised. They’ve basically taken all of the positive aspects of Google’s adwords and removed all the crud. It’s nice and easy and comes with some very interesting options. You can actually choose the time of the day to display your ad – and naturally you can set your timezone.
The use of AJAX and other web 2.0 tricks makes for a lot less clicking which can only be a good thing.
When you go to actually associate keywords with your ad the real power of the technology is unleashed:

And what makes it all the more interesting is that you can extract keywords and phrases from a website in real time (check your logs for the UserAgent “MSNPTC/1.0” )
The other research tools look like they could have a lot of potential, but at present there seem to be some restrictions and bugs with the system (for some odd reason the only languages support are English US, English Singapore and French France).
Of course, as luck would have it, the site threw a lovely error while I was writing this, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to explore it further.