The MIT Advertising Lab’s Blog points us to a upcoming study being released by Jakob Nielsen that will likely have impact how blogs are monetized:

Jakob Nielsen has conducted an eyetracking study of webpages and is planning a series of workshops to share the results. “Is “text-box blindness” getting to be as bad as “banner blindness”? We don’t know yet, but in our eyetracking study, users didn’t look at the Google ads in the right-hand margin of this page any more than they did banner ads.”

I think this continues to indicate that the tried and true methods of monetizing using Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s Publisher Network programs does indeed work – move the ads closer to your content, blend in the backgrounds and the borders, and so on. I expect as Nielsen’s results and study become public that we’ll see more and more of that – and alot less right sidebars on blogs.