Buying and selling locally was primarily eBay in the 2000's. The turn of the decade saw the popup of many rivals which took a small percentage of eBay's business away but never really dented it and struggled to advertise to local people unless you invested money in flyers or newspaper ads. At this point people started to use Facebook, a free tool for everyone and have people share an item in their local area to try and sell the various items.

Royston Ads and Manchester Ads was a great idea because we wanted to test a town and a city of Manchesters size to see whether it would work long term. Because of this so we decided to design something that would encourage locals to interact using a better tool away from sharing on Facebook, eBay etc. We had designed the website and even had it partially developed until Facebook suddenly created 'Marketplace' which is what we know to this day. The moment we saw this we knew the idea was unwanted and quickly scrapped it.