Mequoda Method History and Methodology

ARTICLE SNIPPET - A Brief Letter From Editor and Author Don Nicholas About the History and Methodology Behind the Mequoda Method

I have been involved in Internet marketing and publishing since 1995, when I was running an agency called Blue Dolphin Direct—primarily a print direct marketing and editorial consulting firm for a variety of magazine and newsletter clients. It was during that time when the folks at Computerworld had the revolutionary idea that we could sell subscriptions to their print magazine via the Internet. The program took about eight months to develop and was successful, in that we were able to sell print subs at a cost per order of about $65—a little below their average cost per order via direct mail. And that was the beginning of our journey.

In early 2000, we converted the agency into BlueDolphin.com, which was an early, successful online retailer of print magazine and newsletter subscriptions—albeit a hub-less site. And although we became very good at mining our database, we were not so good at building it through the kind of frictionless sources that we see successful integrated media companies using today.

• In late 2003, we concluded that the action was not in managing a centralized retail site for the print magazine and newsletter community but, instead, in helping individual publishers build their own portals, or hubs.
• So three of us formed Digital Media Advisors—still not having a clue about what we now know as Mequoda Methodology.
• We spent 2004 researching successful online companies and, discovering similarities among them, began to label the approach they seemed to be following as the "Media Quote Daily Methodology."
• That was quite a mouthful and, rather quickly, the shorthand version emerged: "Mequoda Methodology."
• In early 2005, we decided to change our company name to Mequoda Group and rebrand every product we produced under the Mequoda label—including Internet Media Review which, along with SWEPA, was the precursor to the current Mequoda Library.

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