Twenty-five years ago today, French-born Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar founded a company called AuctionWeb. Its successful early sale of a broken laser pointer did not indicate the heights the site, later re-christened ‘eBay’, would scale.

In becoming a multibillion dollar company, eBay transcended its early reliance on the strength of the Beanie Baby market to dominate the online auction and person-to-person sales world.

Offering a reminder of why it’s been one of the few true Dotcom survivors, the company has cruised through the pandemic with a boom in the sale of ‘preloved’ fashion and homeware, a trend thought to have been accelerated by lockdowns and high street closures.

Its continued success is testament to the idea that “one person’s rubbish may be another’s treasure”. But this truth also presents significant communications challenges. The company has had to react to waves of negative publicity relating to its wares and the format of its marketplace in the past quarter of a century.

Back in the spring, the company had to remove more than 15 million listings around the world as sellers tried to cash in on desperate demand for items like face masks and hand sanitiser.

Beyond that, there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to historic ‘criticism of eBay’. It paints a painful picture of a seemingly endless battle against fraud, forgeries and rigged feedback. As with so many contemporary tech platforms, the artist formerly known as AuctionWeb can be a stage for some of the worst facets of human nature.

Omidyar once said: “In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay… everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.”

It feels like a prescient observation, if you subscribe to the idea that the internet has gone from a place of wide-eyed optimism in the 1990s to something much more cynical in the last few years. Reading through some of the complaints and controversies, eBay could easily be held up as a case study of this transformation.

But despite the earlier quote, the company’s founder does not wholly subscribe to the idea of internet evil. After all, he’s made a fortune out of seeing treasure where others see trash. So perhaps, even in this sceptical age, it’s worth ending with some of his more positive words: “If you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, you’ll rarely be disappointed.”