I think it's all the embedded content and the huge banner (that somewhat unrelated to the headline) at the top, etc is not really meshing together.

The site design could use a bit of love.

The primary issue is that the design is very obviously driven by the goal of monetization. On my laptop, the top half of the page is dominated by the navigation bar at the top (starting with "Premium Membership") and the "Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs" box, featuring a giant "Go Premium?" button, which ends up being right in the middle of the page. I'd estimate that <20% of the space above the fold is useful content.

In addition, there are a number of polish issues that exacerbate the spammy feeling caused by what I described above. There's an escaping bug in the title of the login widget on the right side ("YOU\'RE LOGGED OUT"). You use a number of different background colors (the search widget has a blue one, the "What's new here" has an off-white one). There are too many groups of social media buttons (on the left of the main container, under the search box, under the video clip). There are a lot of horizontal and vertical separators, and they have differing styles and amounts of padding.

Hope that helps!

masthead/call to action is too tall (occupies too much of the above-the-fold on my laptop)

    #header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ }

sidebar is too wide, relative to the width of the content.

    #side { width: 210px; }
    #main { width: 745px; }

these adjustments obviously require other adjustments, but try them out to see how it feels less claustrophobic.

edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U