A Brief History
2003 - UsedVancouver.com is founded by Mark Rainer and Stephen Chan as a concept designed to address landfill and greenhouse gas emission problems in Vancouver B.C. By recycling unwanted goods out of the garbage system, less items would need to be manufactured, in turn lowering greenhouse gas emissions while saving people money. The business model is based on paid advertising from commercial advertisers.
2004 - UsedVancouver.com, is re-launched after Mark Rainer partners with Don Barthel. 50 other similar domain names are registered for other cities.
2005 - New sites are launched: UsedOttawa.com, UsedWinnipeg.com and UsedVictoria.com (which all quickly grow to surpass UsedVancouver.com’s active ads). The new sites are grouped under the new UsedCanada.com name.
2006 - UsedCanada.com, positions itself as “Canada’s answer to eBay”. The company acquires Ottawa-based TradeBug.com with its trade name and audience, which is merged into UsedOttawa.com. More sites are launched including UsedCalgary.com, UsedEdmonton.com, UsedRegina.com and UsedPEI.com.
2007 - UsedCanada.com’s network of local free classified websites grows 400% from previous year. The traffic as measured by Google tips the scales at over a million pages served per day. Black Press of Victoria, BC, acquires UsedCanada.com from Don Barthel. Black Press is the largest, privately owned publisher of community newspapers in North America.
2008 - UsedCanada.com is repositioned as UsedEverywhere.com with a network of 73 free classified websites in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Total traffic grows to 1.6 million unique visitors and over 55 million page views per month.