iJustine at the 2010 Streamy Awards
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. She ranked among the top 1000 users in the world with over a 1.5 million Twitter followers, over 500,000 instagram and facebook followers and she had over 3.1 million subscribers to her five YouTube channels that combine for over 454 million video views. She has also guest-starred on the YouTube show The Annoying Orange as Orange's love interest Passion Fruit.Her television acting credits include guest appearances on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Criminal Minds, The Vampire Diaries and The Bold & The Beautiful.
Early Life[]
The daughter of a coal miner and physical education teacher, Ezarik grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents are Michelle and Steve Ezarik. At the time of her high school graduation, she resided in the Scenery Hill area in Washington County, Pennsylvania.
Ezarik and her younger sister Breanne, who was three grades behind her, were honor students at Bentworth High School, where Justine was a member of the class of 2002. Breanne (Bentworth class of 2005) went on to be one of the school's best volleyball players, and class president. Justine's youngest sister, Jenna (Bentworth class of 2008) was an All-state volleyball player as well as an honor student. Upon graduation from high school, Justine earned the annual scholarship from the Washington Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Professionals.
Early Career[]
After graduating from the Pittsburgh Technical Institute in 2004, Ezarik landed several jobs in graphic design and video editing before starting her own business. In December 2006, she was named one of five finalists in the "Yahoo! Talent Show", a Yahoo! sponsored competition for best online videos.
She played a photojournalist covering a bank robbery in downtown Pittsburgh on the television series The Kill Point from Spike TV, which starred John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg, filmed in May 2007. In 2007, she was an occasional co-host and panel member on MacBreak and MacBreak Weekly with Leo Laporte.
Ezarik appeared live on the Internet through the use of a wireless webcam and microphone on her own iJustine lifecasting channel on Justin Kan's Justin.tv, where she began transmitting her life via the Internet on May 29, 2007. She was never paid for any of this volunteer work on Kan's channel as a beta-tester.
Her reality-video blog was the first one launched on Justin.tv. Kan had been encouraged by fans and followers to allow someone else to make a guest appearance on his lifecasting channel.
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. 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."
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, Minnesota. She had been invited by 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.
She covered the July 22, 2007, "The Kill Point" series premiere party live on her lifecast video stream. Ezarik was cited as among the website's most popular lifecasters in the October 2007 issues of both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
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 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 early September 2007, she was featured as the lead story on the Yahoo! homepage, which boosted her ratings up to as high as 4000 viewers at any given moment. As of late September 2007, she was living in Pittsburgh and held a position as spokesperson for Pittsburgh Councilman Bill Peduto. She also landed a job with Xtrain, which was a firm that specializes 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. In October 2007, she was described as one of the web's most popular lifecasters in Tribune Company affiliates such as the Chicago Tribune. That fall, she was a featured participant in the first annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo, which bills itself as the World's Largest Social Media Conference.
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. 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 while on vacation. That June, Ezarik was named by Intel and its PR firm Ogilvy & Mather to a 10-member social media strategy advisory board. In late 2008, she relocated her base of operation from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California.
Ezarik posted a video about wanting to order a cheeseburger on YouTube. It got 600,000 views in its first week. Ezarik has come to view iJustine as a character. As a result, she does not curse or drink on any videos she releases. By January 2009 she reduced her lifecasting a few hours a week, and by April 2009 her lifecast channel fell silent. When Ezarik first moved to Los Angeles, she was managed by Richard Frias, who also manages YouTube celebrities HappySlip and KevJumba, 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.At the time, she believed that her fanbase was predominately between the ages of 11 and 18.
In October 2008, she became the host of an online, twice weekly music and lifestyle program produced by PluggedIn.com called The PluggedIn 5. In 2008 she made residence in Los Angeles. She has a series of advertisements by the name of "Lost in America" appearing on AT&T's website. The series of ads, which features Ezarik 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.
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. She has also been hired by MTV and Dick Clark Productions to host online preshows for awards broadcasts. 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. 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. The article notes that Ezarik does her work with a $400 Canon Powershot digital camera and a $12 green rug from Ikea to create her green screen.
On March 1, 2010, the 2010 Streamy Awards nominations included Ezarik in the Best Vlogger category. Ezarik was listed as 97th in Maxim's "Hot 100" list for the year 2010. 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 work for Mattel and Intel. In April 2011, she was nominated for the Webby Award for Best Web Personality/Host. 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, voted on by the public. Ezarik won the People's Voice Award in this category.
In November 2013, iJustine hosted a social media lounge for the HALO Awards.