iJustine
Justine Ezarik (pronounced [iːˈzeɪ.ɹɪk], born March 20, 1984), is a viral video comedienne, freelance graphic/web designer and video editor originally based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is best known as iJustine, a lifecaster who communicated directly with her thousands of viewers on her Justin.tv channel, ijustine.tv. She has made more than 200 videos, including satires on such subjects as Lost and parkour. Her videos have received more than 25 million views, 16 million on YouTube alone. Her popularity is such that a video about her wanting to order a cheeseburger got 600,000 YouTube views in a week. She is sometimes described as a “lifecasting star,” a “new media star,” or one of the web’s most popular lifecasters. In 2008, she relocated her base of operation from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California.
iJustine Ezarik is known for her “300-page iPhone bill”, which followed the first month of service after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. The viral video earned her international attention and celebrity. The bad publicity that AT&T earned as a result of her video featuring her reviewing this bill and similar stories coincided with the announcement that detailed billing would become optional for iPhone users. As of June 1, 2009, she had over a half a million Twitter followers, and nearly 100,000 subscribers to the iJustine YouTube channel.
iJustine Ezarik was also featured in the August 28, 2007 weekly installment of Kevin Sites’ People of the Web series on Yahoo! News along with Justin Kan, the creator of Justin.TV. Sites called her “the star of this network so far,” and said “she has model good looks and easy cyber savvyness that attracts both technophiles and casual users alike.” The final cut of the interview video included footage from the live web cast of the interview that showed Ezarik’s webcam viewpoint. When Sites asked her to turn off her lifecasting equipment later in the interview, he noted that “at once the conversation seemed more relaxed and natural,” and she discussed the difficulty of having people watching and publicly judging her all day.
In an interview published September 21, 2007 she discussed her lifecasting activities with a reporter for TG Daily, telling him that she has tried not to change her personal routine, except that she now vocalizes her thoughts by talking to herself for the benefit of the audience. She also now concerns herself with what the people around her are saying, especially if they try to share private information like phone numbers. In discussing her personal safety concerns, she said, “I’ve had a lot of people show up places that I am, call hotels and restaurants that I’m at. Everything has to be taken into consideration. I’m also very lucky that nothing bad has happened so far. Makes me think I should quit before it does!
Ezarik was also hired to appear in three a national TV ad campaign for Mozy, an award-winning online backup and recovery system. In April 2009, she had approximately 50,000 MySpace friends and the system limit of 5,000 Facebook friends. An April 2009, USA Today article credited her with 386,000 Twitter followers. By June 2009, she had 590,000 Twitter followers, 94,000 subscribers to the iJustine YouTube channel and 25,000 Facebook fans.The USA Today story goes on to describe how she has scaled down her lifecasting because of its deleterious impact on her life. Carl’s Jr. has hired a team of YouTube stars, including Ezarik to produce made-for-web ads for their new Portobello Mushroom Six-Dollar Burger on the Carl’s Jr. YouTube channel, each endorser’s YouTube page, and other Google-related media outlets. Following the August 6, 2009, Twitter Denial-of-service attack, Ezarik was featured in The Wall Street Journal describing her coping mechanisms, such as repeatedly tapping the F5 function key (the refresh button), for Twitter outages.
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