You can make money with Squidoo by ranking long tails, but they're losing their "authority" status. They get slapped around by Google and Yahoo all the time.
A few months back they were a PR8 site and they got slapped down to a PR6. After which Squidoo started cleaning up "spam" lenses and groups. Since then, it's returned to a PR7.
Recently their was a stretch where pretty much nobody received Yahoo traffic (which was a big traffic source for most lensmasters) after an algy change. Then supposedly Seth Godin spoke with Yahoo about it and traffic has picked up again.
One great thing about Squidoo is the niche market research that can be done. It has been so overrun by guru types (think: Howie Schwarz, etc.) and their sheep, you can pretty easily determine what markets are being tested by these peeps. For instance, Schwarz makes a killing during Halloween by selling costumes.