Justine Ezarik (/iːˈzɛər.ɪk/ee-ZAIR-ik; born March 20, 1984) is an American YouTuber.[1] She is best known as iJustine, with over one billion views on her YouTube channel.[2] She gained attention as a lifecaster who communicated directly with her millions of viewers on her Justin.tv channel, ijustine.tv.[3] She acquired notability in roles variously described as a "lifecasting star,"[4] a "new media star,"[5] or one of the Internet's most popular lifecasters.[6] She posts videos on her main channel iJustine.[7]
After graduating from the Pittsburgh Technical Institute in 2004, Ezarik landed several jobs in graphic design and video editing before starting her own business.[13] In December 2006, she was named one of five finalists in the "Yahoo! Talent Show", a Yahoo!-sponsored competition for best online videos.[16][17]
Ezarik appeared live on the Internet through the use of a wireless webcam and microphone on her own iJustine[20]lifecasting channel on Justin Kan's Justin.tv, where she began transmitting her life via the Internet on May 29, 2007.[13][21] She was never paid for any of this volunteer work on Kan's channel as a beta-tester.[22]
Her reality-video blog (vlog) was the first one launched on Justin.tv.[23] Kan had been encouraged by fans and followers to allow someone else to make a guest appearance on his lifecasting channel.[24][25]
At first Ezarik was considering producing a video series for the technology audience because they had been the most captive audience for online video series.[26] She stated that she did not intend to broadcast what she considers private moments, noting "That shouldn't be a problem. I am going to try as much as I can to do 24/7."[13]
When the iPhone debuted in June 2007, Ezarik covered the device's debut at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota a suburb south of Minneapolis. She had been invited by a technology evangelist to film her Internet TV show at the mall instead of covering its debut at the Shadyside Apple store as she had originally planned.[27]
She covered the July 22, 2007, "The Kill Point" series premiere party live on her lifecast video stream.[28] Ezarik was cited as being one of the website's most popular lifecasters in the October 2007 issues of both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.[29][30]
Viral video career and Internet celebrity status
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 said she was "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 showing 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.[31]
In early September 2007, she was featured as the lead story on the Yahoo! homepage which boosted her ratings to as many as 4,000 viewers at any given moment.[8] As of late September 2007, she was living in Pittsburgh and held a position as spokesperson for Pittsburgh CouncilmanBill Peduto. She also landed a job with Xtrain which was a firm that specialized in new media expert training. Although her father remained supportive, her friends were beginning to tire of the intrusive nature of her activities by the end of 2007.[8] In October 2007, she was described as one of the web's most popular lifecasters in Tribune Company affiliates such as the Chicago Tribune.[6] That fall, she was a featured participant in the first annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo[32] which bills itself as the "World's Largest Social Media Conference".[33]
By April 2008, Ezarik had largely reduced her lifecasting productions to a less frequent basis. She had resumed pursuit of her web designer and video editor career and was living in Carnegie. Her new equipment by Nokia enabled her to lifecast and produce streaming video live without a computer connection. She continued to make weekly appearances on her own iJustine website at www.ijustine.tv.[34] Still a Carnegie resident at the time, Ezarik planned to be vacationing in North Carolina when the iPhone 3G was released in July 2008 and hoped to find an AT&T wireless store to upgrade her phone while on vacation.[35] That June Ezarik was named by Intel and its PR firm Ogilvy & Mather to a 10-member social media strategy advisory board.[36] In late 2008, she relocated her base of operation from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles.[22]
iJustine involved in discussions at the Intel insider event where she served on Intel's social media strategy advisory board in May 2008
Ezarik posted a video about wanting to order a cheeseburger on YouTube. It got 600,000 views in its first week.[22] Ezarik has come to view iJustine as a character. As a result, she does not curse or drink alcohol on any videos she releases.[22] By January 2009 she had reduced her lifecasting by a few hours a week, and by April 2009 her lifecast channel fell silent.[37] When Ezarik first moved to Los Angeles, she was managed by Richard Frias who also managed YouTube celebrities HappySlip and KevJumba,[22] but according to a post on Ezarik's alternate Twitter account she was unmanaged and earned money by appearing at conferences and in online promotional spots.[38] At the time, she believed that her fanbase was predominantly between the ages of 11 and 18.[22]
In October 2008, she became the host of an online, twice weekly music and lifestyle program produced by PluggedIn.com called The PluggedIn 5.[39]
In 2008, she lived in an apartment in Los Angeles.[22] She has a series of advertisements by the name of "Lost in America" appearing on AT&T's website.[22] The series of ads, which features herself and Karen Nguyen who is a well-known blogger, has not been viewed as successful in the advertising industry. The series has Ezarik and Nguyen getting lost in various locales and solving their problems using AT&T equipment. After the first eleven episodes over the course of two weeks in November 2008, the series only registered a total of 31,000 views according to Tubemogul.[40]
iJustine in 2010
Ezarik was also hired to appear in three commercials for a national TV ad campaign for Mozy, an award-winning online backup and recovery system.[41] She was also hired by MTV and Dick Clark Productions to host online preshows for awards broadcasts.[42] In April 2009, she had approximately 50,000 MySpace friends and the system limit of 5,000 Facebook friends.[37] An April 2009, USA Today article credited her as having 386,000 Twitter followers.[43] By June 2009, she had 590,000 Twitter followers, 94,000 subscribers to the iJustine YouTube channel, and 25,000 Facebook fans.[44] The USA Today story described how she has scaled down her lifecasting because of its deleterious impact on her life.[43]
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.[44] 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.[45] In December 2009, USA Today reported that Ezarik earns about $75,000 annually from YouTube, and claims she has nearly a million followers on Twitter and 300,000 YouTube subscribers. The same article estimated that she has been viewed on YouTube a total of 64 million times and that her spoof on The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" drew 4.8 million viewers.[42] The article notes that Ezarik does her work with a $400 Canon Powershotdigital camera and a $12 green rug from IKEA to create her green screen.[42]
On March 1, 2010, the 2010 Streamy Awards nominations included her in the Best Vlogger category.[46] Ezarik was listed as 97th in Maxim's "Hot 100" list for the year 2010.[47] In 2010, General Electric hired her to create five videos as part of their Healthymagination campaign. The videos received over 2 million views. She also did some work for Mattel and Intel.[48] In April 2011, she was nominated for the Webby Award for Best Web Personality/Host.[49] The Webby Awards recognizes two classifications of winners each category – The Webby Award, chosen by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and The People's Voice Award which is voted on by the public. Ezarik won the People's Voice Award in the category.[50][51]
Ezarik signed with the William Morris Endeavor in July 2017,[55] and she was named one of the top 10 Top Tech/Business Influencers by Forbes for 2017.[56]
On March 10, 2019, Ezarik surpassed 1,000,000,000 views on her iJustine YouTube channel.[57][58]
Screenshot of the iPhone bill video, showing Ezarik holding up the package
A video recorded by Ezarik about a 300-page iPhone bill that had been mailed to her from AT&T Mobility[60] went viral in August 2007.[61][62][63] Her video focused on the unnecessary waste of paper, as the detailed bill itemized all data transfers made during the first billing period of the original iPhone, including every email and text message. The video clip was picked up by tech blogs,[64] and eventually gained mass media attention as a prominent example of the unusually large bills.[65][66]
Background
Apple released the iPhone in the United States in June 2007. It came with a software "lock" so it could only be used on the AT&T Mobilitynetwork.[67] After purchase, buyers activated their iPhone's AT&T service contract using the Apple iTunes software,[68] during which buyers had the ability to choose their billing preference; however, if no option was specified during activation AT&T defaulted to using detailed billing.[69] Detailed billing itemized every data transfer, including background traffic for e-mail, text messaging, and web browsing.[70] This generated a large number of entries.[65]
After a month's time[71] as early adopters received their first monthly bills, stories of unusually large and expensive iPhone bills circulated. The 300-page bill was exceptional but other heavy users received 50- to 100-page bills.[72] One of the first to attract wider attention was from Ben Kuchera, gaming editor for the technology-related website Ars Technica, who described his 34-sheet, double-sided bill and another 104-page bill sent to a colleague;[65][66] he wrote, "While many of us have had smart-phones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this."[73]
Video
iJustine and her iPhone, in a case, in 2008
Portions of the video were also televised along with one-on-one interviews with Ezarik by several national and local news programs in the United States, including CNN,[74]Fox News Channel,[75]WTAE-TV,[76] and WPXI-TV.[77]ABC News Now also included independent reporting by an ABC News Radio reporter in their video interview.[78]
Ezarik's Internet video commentary focused on the unnecessary waste of paper billing. In the video she highlights the physical size of the bill, not the amount due. "I have an iPhone and I had to switch to AT&T. So, that's wonderful. Well, I got my first AT&T bill, right here in a box," she says at the start of the video.[76] The rest of the video, set to the distinctive music used in American iPhone television commercials, shows her opening the box and flipping through the pages in fast motion.[79] The clip ends with the on-screen caption, "Use e-billing. Save a forest."[65]
Her other comments also followed along the same lines. In a blog posting she wrote, "Apparently, they give you a detailed transaction of every text message sent and received. Completely unnecessary."[61] She told a USA Today reporter, "This is so silly, there's no reason they need to send you this much information."[62] Ezarik is a heavy user who typically sends and receives tens of thousands of text messages a month, which generated an exceptionally long $275[62] bill – 300 double-sided pages that had to be sent in a box with postage charges of $7.[80]
Ten days later, after the video had been viewed more than 3 million times on the Internet[81][70] and had received international news coverage, AT&T sent iPhone users a text message outlining changes in its billing practices.[70][82] The information technology magazine Computerworld included this incident in its list of "Technology's 10 Most Mortifying Moments".[83][84]
On December 1, 2016, Ezarik announced a boardroom advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger on the only season of The New Celebrity Apprentice.[101] Ezarik appears as a main character on the YouTube Red murder-mystery series Escape the Night as the Gambler. In episode 3, titled "Buried Alive" she is killed by being buried alive. She also participated in the fourth season of the series, titled Escape the Night: All-Stars, as the Adventurer. She died in the second episode of the season by being choked to death.
Published works
In May 2014, Simon & Schuster announced that its Atria Publishing Group division had partnered with United Talent Agency and would publish books by a group of social media stars including iJustine.[102] Her book–titled I, Justine (ISBN1476791511)–was released on June 2, 2015. Fast Company writer David Zax described the book saying, "Ezarik wound up writing a sort of work of investigative journalism about herself by digging into a morass of tweets, photos, and videos to help remind herself who she is."[103]
Prior to the development, Justine hosted MacBreak from 2007 to 2011.
When Justine watched the promos for the 4th generationiPad Pro showing all the things that could be done on an iPad, she wondered if she could do a podcast. On March 24, four days after her birthday, Justine recorded a mock podcast under the name "iQuaranJustine" during the recording of the 2020 iPad Pro review.[107] On April 20, while covering the pass-through charging part in her 2020 iPad Pro Magic Keyboard Review, she recorded the pilot episode under the name "Same Brain" with her sister, Jenna.[104]
Release
The podcast released new episodes on a weekly basis on a Saturday. The first non-special episode was released on January 21, 2021, instead of a typical Saturday.
On September 16, 2022, a new episode was released after a 5-month hiatus.
Guests
Phil Spencer was the first guest to appear on the Same Brain podcast.[108][109]
↑Hentges, Rochelle (July 23, 2007). "Hundreds pack Altar Bar for 'Kill Point' premiere". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved September 14, 2007. Ezarik held her digital camera over her head, taking pictures of her mirror image on screen, as she played a photojournalist reporting on the bank heist.
↑Little, Lyneka (October 13, 2007). "Online: Live". Wall Street Journal. ISSN0099-9660. Archived from the original on February 29, 2020. Retrieved January 18, 2019.
↑"Opinion: Phone service". Daily News & Analysis, India. Diligent Media Corporation Ltd. August 27, 2007. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved September 4, 2007. The new iPhone has been staggering users, first with its gizmo-good-looks, then with its functionality and now, about a month after it was launched, with its bills.
↑Reedy, Sarah (August 15, 2008). "Billing confusion a pain for wireless customers and customer service". Telephony Online. Archived from the original on August 23, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2008. When the first version of the iPhone came out, in what Computerworld called one of "technology's 10 most mortifying moments", consumers with 300-page bills voiced their disdain in what became a viral video on the Internet.
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