At first look, the system isn’t a million miles away from Google AdWords; you get a line of 70 characters for your creative, as opposed to 2 lines of 35 characters each. Bidding follows the same lines as Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture), where you pay one cent more than the advertiser below you. In addition, there are options to limit your ad’s appearance by time and day of the week, and a lot of demographic information, which Google mysteriously added to AdWords within the week.

For the moment, AdCenter is focussed exclusively on US, France and Singapore , but this will soon change and word is out that by mid 2006 it will include the UK marketplace too.

Industry commentators are generally full of praise for the interface, although some users have found problems when trying to upload their creatives. The system is generally easy to use, and the demographic data is a step forward, although how useful and how accurate the data is remains to be seen.

The product is obviously still teething, and there are a few tweaks needed; but any competition is good news; and when MSN/Live switch totally to AdCenter for their paid results (currently 40% or so are served) things should get really interesting…