After Google bought Doubleclick for over $3 billion and Yahoo cleaned up on the bits of Right Media Exchange it didn’t already own, Microsoft has thrown an incredible $6 billion on the table for Aquantive. We’re pretty sure large chunks of Aquantive will be dumped back on the market. They’re probably best known for the ad serving platform Accipiter, which is part of the Aquantive house of brands via its Atlas subsidiary. Microsoft left it late to get into the rapidly consolidating online advertising market and it looks like they’ve paid a hefty price for their procrastination. The Aquantive empire includes the largest digital ad agency in the US, Avenue A | Razorfish. We can’t see Microsoft holding on to all of this stuff, so expect to see a bunch of disinvestments in the coming year or so. It’s obviously the ad serving platform and associated analysis technologies that Microsoft really want.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer tells us:

“The advertising industry is evolving and growing at an incredible pace, moving increasingly toward online and IP-served platforms, which dramatically increases the importance of software for this industry. Today’s announcement represents the next step in the evolution of our ad network from our initial investment in MSN, to the broader Microsoft network including Xbox Live, Windows Live and Office Live, and now to the full capacity of the Internet.”

So Microsoft is pushing out to own a higher percentage of the ad revenue swirling around the web. With IPTV growing very fast, Google has long had its eyes on some of the billions of dollars of television advertising money in the business. Microsoft needed a respected advertising serving platform, and fast. Aquantive has it. Along with a load of other stuff that Microsoft will surely drop as soon as it can in order to recoup some of that hefty price tag.