Users prefer sidebars on the left

From my experience, ads at the bottom of a post makes most money, followed by ads in the left sidebar followed by ... well, haven't had a single click on the right sidebar ads, doesn't matter how high or low I put it. When I only had the right sidebar ad, it didn't bring in any moolah, then when I added one on the left sidebar and at the bottom of the posts, suddenly the money started rolling in.

Yay, the theme is working again, thought something was wrong :p

Google actually has some research done on where users click most (using JavaScript to track clicks) and they've compiled it into a page-hotspot image which is very accurate to what I've seen so far: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954

Just above the content below the menu is the primary hotspot it seems.

I think this theme is broken as well.

I prefer building my own themes from scratch, at least I know what's broken and what's not when something goes wrong, although it does take forever to get a theme to work properly.

I think since people's attention span on the web is so short, they see the ads on the left side first as they read from the left to right, people who have learned the ability to skip over ads in sidebars then see the ad above the content and they're done reading (those that actually manages to stay on your page for longer than 5 seconds), they get an ad at the bottom which appeals to the bored readers looking for something else to read, if they don't find the ad interesting, you give them a related articles and most commented list of posts which will expose them to more ads.
Stil

Good luck with that theme!

lol, I've been jobless for the last 4 months, started enjoying the waking up in the mornings, coding something, blogging a bit and then doing nothing for the rest of the day :-)
Should probably get a real job sometime again, blogging doesn't come close to engineering salaries :p

The easiest way is to look at existing themes, see what they've done in each of the theme files and just pull out the functions they use, eg, register_sidebars for example, when you're done pulling out all the functions you can use, just write a theme / site and put these functions in there to fill the space with content, otherwise check out codex.wordpress.org, they have documentation on how the wordpress api works in detail.