• by Masha Geller , December 14, 2001

Much has been said and written in the past few weeks about surround sessions - NYTimes.com's new way of attracting advertisers to their site by allowing them to follow site visitors around with their ads during the entire visit.

I've written enough of these columns to know that anytime I quote someone saying that they've invented something new and exciting, there will always be someone who will say they've invented the very same thing a long time ago.

That was the case with a company called VIPCAST, whose president Vivek Dave emailed me a few days ago, claiming that they were the original company that developed Sessions back in June of 2001. The email stated that NYTimes.com's surround sessions are "only an extension of Session Billing which was originally created by VIPCAST."

Being the Grinch I am, I ignored the email at first, but then decided to go back to find out the truth. This is what I came up with.

First off, very few people know about this company, because they've been in development for a few years and just recently released their product into the world. That product is an interesting ad serving technology, which Dave claims can peacefully co-exist with the ad servers already out there. Apparently, VIPCast takes an ad and pre-caches it to be served at certain times during a user's visit to a site.

The interesting part is, because the ad is pre-cached the website publisher only pays VIPCast for the first time the ad is served. Thus, the more ads displayed per user session the greater the percentage of ads that are served for free (to the publisher). Dave says the publishers can pass the savings on to the advertisers, or keep it all to themselves.

VIPCast calls the billing model "CPS," which stands for Cost Per Thousand Sessions, and claims Session Billing will "revolutionize the Internet advertising market." I don't know about that, but the concept does sound interesting enough.

In the end, it looks like Session Billing really has very little in common with NYTimes' surround sessions, but VIPcast still seems to be worth a look. As Dave put it, they're planning a "full-out, glitzy, New York-style" launch in the upcoming months, so keep an eye out.