Advertising - I'm Stuck In The Stone Ages I think

So let me explain the scenario guys.

I have a website that each monthly, roughly receives around 1.8 Million Page Views, sometimes more, sometimes less. It just depends. My traffic demographic is around 60% U.S. with the rest being made up by Canada, UK and Australia.

I use the following advertisers - TribalFusion, BurstMedia, PulsePoint, YardBarker and Google Ad Sense. In terms of how ads are served, it’s your traditional old fashion manual linking between ad sizes through the various platforms.

My revenue is decent, but I can’t help but feel I am missing out on potentially monetizing all those page views. I know for example there are a few issues with the manual linking such as impression loss and slow serving as ads pass go through various providers.

So I guess the next step is an ad server which I’ve flirted with many years ago briefly, but haven’t touched since, mainly because I have absolutely no clue what to do with it or how to use it. With the site going through a re-design soon I guess now is the time to pursue this again but I need some help from the experts - is this A) worth doing, and B) easy enough for novices like me to do myself? Are there any guides on how to set this up? Also, would this be something I need to manage on a day-to-day basis?

I’m also interested in selling my own inventory without the likes of TribalFusion and co taking huge cuts which increases the need for an ad server.

Would really appreciate some advice here guys, or any PM’s from people that would be interested in helping directly…