In an intriguing media experiment, The Washington Post is offering to sell advertising space on commercial blogs on a revenue-split basis. Blogs accepted into the beta program will be rotated in a box situated bottom right on the WashingtonPost.com front page. With 8 million readers a month that could be a useful place to be.

Syntagma has thrown in a few blogs to test out the system. However, the designer of the scheme, Jeff Burkett, in a comment on Problogger, has already stated what we all thought : “Not only is pricing going to be a challenge, but the volume of blog submissions has been very high and it is a lot of information to sort through.”

Here’s part of the description of the scheme :

The Sponsored Blogroll is an index on the washingtonpost.com homepage that promotes bloggers who are participating in a partnership with the advertising team of WPNI. If you are a blogger or blog network looking to expand your readership and advertising, our Sponsored Blogroll program can be the boost you’ve been looking for.

Here’s how it works:
A link to members’ blogs will be featured in our Sponsored Blogroll index, giving your writing promotional space on the washingtonpost.com home page and giving you an introduction to an audience of 8 million readers monthly. At the same time, our hardworking sales reps will help connect your signature musings with the huge number of advertisers we deal with every day who are looking for the next big, slightly-outside-the-mainstream idea. …

We are primarily interested in blogs that focus on Technology, Business, Health, Automotive and Travel topics, but welcome submissions on any subject.

It will be interesting to see what kind of advertising results from this. Non-commercial bloggers may have to sharpen up their expertise unless the Post makes it easy for them. Clearly, there’s still a lot of development work needed to make the scheme fly, but all plaudits to Jeff for giving this some wellie.