There is no adsense for email (big opprotunity) but right now monetization is through directly selling ads or through ecommerce like groupon and thrillist do.
You've got a list of people who are very interested in a particular topic. Hopefully you know some more about them too (read: you should be asking questions on the signup page that advertisers want to know the answers to). You can probably tell what kind of ads are going to do well with your audience better than a text analysis algorithm. And ideally you want advertisers who understand the value of an email newsletter over other media, not ones who are willing to appear next to certain keywords, wherever they may be.