[4] The website was established in 1997 by Rathgar brothers Brian and Eamonn Fallon,[5] aged just 20 and 15 at the time,[3] who were frustrated by the need to resort to newspaper classifieds in order to find a place to live.

[6]: 00:10  Speaking to Irish technology news website Silicon Republic, Eamonn Fallon explained the origins of the company:[7] I guess if we really researched it properly we wouldn't have done it... Back then in the late Nineties there were only 50,000 people online – you couldn't really build an online business back then with that amount of people using technology.

What changed the game was these free internet discs that were being dispersed for dial-up and I think we were in the right place, the right time and we were the right age...[7] Fallon explained that in the early days of the business the brothers didn't seek investment, which he regarded as a good thing in hindsight as investors would have looked for a faster return on their money.

[5] By comparison, RTÉ.ie, the webpage of Irish broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann, recorded only 117.2m monthly page impressions at that point.

[5] By 2013, daft.ie had been subsumed into Fallon's wider group named Distilled Media which Silicon Republic described as an "online empire".