The “hot news” on the Blogosphere this morning is the interview between Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis in the Wall Street Journal.  The discussion is geared more towards the individual blogger with the experience Jason has as the CEO of a major blog network.

The discussion (according to tech.memeorandum) is pretty diverse.  A lot of people are focusing in on the “if you hit this traffic level you make good money …” aspect of the article, however I think this is only part of the story.  Jason touches on it with this short comment:

The fact is that the “long tail” of sites is largely unmonetized. Over the next five to 10 years, Google AdSense, Weblogs Inc., Yahoo Publisher Network, AOL’s white-labeled version of AdSense, and Microsoft’s “AdSense killer” will enable the monetization of a lot of those smaller sites.

For businesses blogging, there might not be much, if any, interest in putting ads on their blogs.  However, if you are a small business or a solo pro … earning a little extra cash is a nice bonus.

Looking at the larger picture, though, most of the major ad networks recognize that there are a lot of untapped (un-added?) blogs out there.  Leveraging that potential real estate is going to be the challenge of 2006.

Tags: blog advertising, long tail