Low CTR, wondering if it's me or factors out of my control

I run a website that is dedicated to covering high school football in my area of the state. I have an extremely low CTR, according to many of the posts that I have read on DP.

This month I am averaging a whopping .33% CTR.

I am nearing 500,000 impressions for the month. My site and my time are 99% content driven. Adsense is sort of an afterthought, however I am starting to put more and more time into placement and optimization.

Is it possible that it's the type of environment that I am dealing with. The majority of my users are High School - College age. I bet they are pretty good at just ignoring ads because they will be more saavy then other age groups. Maybe I am just making up excuses, I sure hope so. I don't have time to go out and sell advertising because I spend every waking night and day adding articles, photos, stats, etc.

I am not sure what the best way to get advice is. Should I post a few links to pages on my site, I am not sure if this violates anything or not.

Thanks!
Titan

 

This is one of the only threads I have ever seen to never get a response.

I would be happy to provide more information to get some insight on my issue.

Thanks,
Titan

 

Here's a few quick examples of the formats that I have been using.

http://www.fridaynighttitans.com/svl/default.htm

http://www.fridaynighttitans.com/standings/default.htm

http://www.fridaynighttitans.com/playoffs/default.htm

http://www.fridaynighttitans.com/playoffs/2006/d1/default.htm

 

I looked at http://www.fridaynighttitans.com and my thoughts are that your ads does not get much attention.
If I were you I would try to get the ads higher up on the webpage.
Like where you have that gray area above the picture of the player, try to blend in the ads there instead. Maybe you should try a Link Unit, that would probably make it blend in much better.

Regards,
Lukas

 

i agree with autodrawings, a link unit above would be ideal. YOu can also put a leaderboard after the header. Play around your site and see which gets the best results.

cheers,
jerome

 

Thanks guys, there is just an internal struggle inside me right now to take away from the look of the site and its content. But I guess if that's what it takes I will think a lot harder about it!