I, Justine: An Analog Memoir

by Justine Ezarik

  “Oh, they’re hearin’ us,” he says, in that heavy Brooklyn accent he’s famous for, before turning to Tom. “Oh, this is that thing you started. The invention.”

  There’s another outburst of chatter, mostly about the Internet in general—Carson asks Brooke and me where we’re calling from—but when Clay suddenly realizes he can communicate directly with the two of us, he completely changes tack. “What are you, a dancer?” he asks me. “What do you do?”

  “Am I a dancer?” I ask, incredulous. “Uh, no . . . are you a dancer?”

  At this point, Carson jumps in to try to explain, again, who Brooke and I are, that we’re pretty well known for making videos on the web—that he’s done some work with us, in fact. He goes on to describe the ways in which he’s fascinated by what’s now possible online. And that’s when Clay gets excited. “Dis is something he can make money from, I’m tellin’ ya,” he says to Carson, while pointing directly at Tom’s computer. At the time, I wasn’t sure if the “this” he was referring to was the computer, the Internet in general, or VoIP technology, but he continued: “This thing? He had it last time . . . where there’s people in there . . . that you can actually talk to!”

  Tom had to explain that, while he might be considered a kind of pioneer in terms of producing mainstream-style content for the web, he didn’t actually invent the Internet. Or Skype. It was amazing. The whole thing reminded me of that scene from Zoolander when Owen Wilson’s character is just blown away to discover that the secret files he’s looking for are, literally, in the computer.

  • • •

  So, I was officially living on the West Coast, and as 2007 bled into 2008, I was still doing a lot of the same sorts of things—partnering with emerging tech and social media companies and attending tech shows and trade conferences, mostly. Karen and I returned to Macworld that January (this time we decided we wanted to be first through the doors, so we camped out outside the convention hall as if waiting for another iPhone launch). By March, I was headed down to Austin for my first trip to South by Southwest.

  I think most people know SXSW either as a music festival (which, despite becoming extremely popular in recent years, has actually been around since the eighties, launching the careers of artists like Hanson, John Mayer, James Blunt, and Katy Perry), or a film festival (the film component was added back in 1994), but it’s also got an “interactive” element, too. Every year, people from around the country flock down to Texas to check out the latest in gaming and gadgets, as well as attend panels with top Internet and tech entrepreneurs. In fact, it was at the 2007 conference that the founders of Twitter, then still very much a fledgling site with middling traffic, made some supersmart marketing moves, including setting up a couple giant plasma screens in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center, on which they streamed nothing but tweets from festivalgoers. It proved to be the site’s tipping point, and usage exploded, skyrocketing from an average of twenty thousand messages a day (across the entire network) to more than sixty thousand. By the end of the week, Twitter had won the SXSW Web Award (in the blog category). By April, Newsweek had published an article titled “Twitter: Is Brevity the Next Big Thing?” And by March 2008, around the time I was headed down to Texas, the site had grown to more than a million total users and was averaging 3 million tweets a day. Which sounds like a lot, except, hold on—we’ll come back to that in a minute.

  I was in town with the crew from Viddler, promoting their video-sharing site as well as their “Brand Yourself” campaign. We made some videos and hit up the panels—the year’s big news was that Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, was delivering the keynote speech. During the second half of the festival, though, when the tech portion more or less ends and the music portion takes over, I thought it would be fun to do some man-on-the-street-style interviews. I wanted to see if these die-hard music fans knew anything about the tech portion of the conference. (Spoiler alert: they did not.) Here are some of my favorite results from that unexpectedly hilarious question-and-answer session:

  Q: Did you check out Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech?

  A: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  A: Everyone keeps talking about Mark Zuckerberg. Who is that? He’s alt-country, right?

  A: Does he have a demo?

  Q: Have you heard of Twitter?

  A: I haven’t.

  A: No.

  A: Juner?I

  Q: Did you hear they released the iPhone SDK?

  A: I don’t know what that means. That’s just letters.

  Obviously I wasn’t having a lot of success with the tech questions, so I briefly decided to ask about video games. Since this was a music crowd, I figured everyone would be familiar with Rock Band (essentially the sequel to the wildly popular Guitar Hero series). Here’s how that went:

  Q: So, Rock Band. What level are you? Hard? Expert?

  A: Uh, I don’t know. . . . We’re indie right now?

  And now for my personal favorite:

  Q: Say a lot of people started visiting your website. How would you deal with the scaling of your infrastructure?

  A: Uh, I wouldn’t. I’d just chill.

  It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that had any of these people turned the tables and asked me a question about music, I would have failed miserably. I knew nothing about the music industry; I knew even less about emerging or underground artists. I just couldn’t help but giggle when the guy asked where he could find Mark Zuckerberg’s demo tape.

  • • •

  With the live-stream largely done (I’d still stream occasionally, either as part of my weekly podcast or for the heck of it, but I was down to a couple hours a week) I returned to making funny videos, something I hadn’t done with any real consistency in months. The only difference was that now—in contrast to the “early days,” that period back in 2006, before I’d entered the Yahoo! Talent Show—my online network had grown considerably. It’s hard to be exact, but my best estimate is that I had amassed fifty thousand Myspace friends, I was probably hovering somewhere around twenty to fifty thousand YouTube subscribers, and I’d long ago hit my five-thousand-friend limit on Facebook.

  In April, I filmed my first music video, a spoof on the Madonna/Justin Timberlake collaboration “4 Minutes.” It was common practice in those days—actually, it’s still common practice—for me to make up words while singing along to the radio, because I never knew what the real words were, anyway. At some point, it seemed like a concept that might work on YouTube, so I changed the urgent, social-awareness lyrics of “4 Minutes” to an urgent, personal awareness of just how long it usually took me to download an episode of Lost (one of my favorite shows) to iTunes on FiOS: Come on, store, I’m waiting for my new download to go / Well, I don’t have time, you will be mine, wanna play my new show.

  That clip has been viewed nearly a million times. And, yes, I’m embarrassed just typing those ridiculous lyrics.

  I kept going with the music videos for a while, continuing to film spoofs of greater and greater extravagance, like the Black Eyed Peas hit “I Gotta Feeling” (more than 15 million views), which was altered from a song about the impending awesomeness of a night out with friends to the impending awesomeness of the new profile pic that was sure to result from a night out with friends. Or Shakira’s “She Wolf,” in which I changed the chorus to ask, “What the hell is a she wolf?” (Because, seriously, what the hell is it?) To this day, they’re still some of the most-watched videos I’ve ever produced, despite working with rudimentary equipment: the camera I used for “I Gotta Feeling” was a Canon point-and-shoot; my green screen was an IKEA blanket tacked up to the wall in my room.

  By July, the second-generation iPhone—the 3G—had been released. I’d had every intention of going to an Apple Store in North Carolina, where I was vacationing with my family, to cover the launch, until I realized that the closest one was more than three hours away from our beach rental. As an alternative, I thought I’d try to buy one at a l
ocal AT&T outlet, until I realized the one I’d been planning on visiting was not, in fact, a store. Fail #2. Back home in California, nearly a week after the launch, I called more than thirty-five Apple Stores in search of a phone, only to discover that every single store was out of stock. The resulting video, “THE WORLD IS OUT OF IPHONES!!!!!”—in which an Apple employee told me that Steve Jobs was “a big butthead,” in response to my question “Why is he doing this?”—landed on the Yahoo home page.

  By August, I’d filmed my “I WANT A CHEESEBURGER” rant, which hit six hundred thousand views inside of a week.

  It wasn’t just me out there, either, making strange videos seemingly about nothing and racking up huge numbers of views online—by mid-2008, there was suddenly a growing crop of YouTube “stars.” Being “famous on the Internet” had become, well, a thing. As a result, major corporations—not just tech start-ups, but the GEs and Fords and Intels of the world—had started hiring Internet personalities as spokespeople. Web stars were starting, slowly, to cross over. And with that sudden increase of attention came what I might call the first major wave of backlash from cultural critics and writers and reporters in the mainstream press. A number of articles were published about me during this period, some written with barely disguised snark, others with out-and-out disdain, describing my “popularity” as both inexplicable and unearned. It was during this time that a reputable tech publication labeled me a “bug-eyed, squealing” enthusiast. A popular Manhattan-based blog ran a piece called “Pretty Girls Becoming Popular Online: What Does It Mean?” in which they referred to the people who watched my videos or subscribed to my channels as “mindless lemmings.” It seemed like a growing and vocal contingent of people were openly rooting for folks like me to fail.

  Let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we?

  Roughly nine months or so after the “300-page iPhone bill” video went viral, I was hired by AT&T to film a reality web series called Lost in America. The premise was that I would travel to various cities across the U.S.—Anchorage, Austin, Chicago—where I’d have to solve “missions” or “mysteries” using only my mobile phone, a Samsung Black-Jack II. Bonus: Karen Nguyen would be my costar.

  I loved the whole experience—who wouldn’t love getting paid to travel the country with one of their closest friends? The show gave me another chance to work with the guys at Studio 8, a hilarious comedy website that had evolved into a full-blown production studio, specializing in creating online video content. (I had filmed the Carson Daly video with the Studio 8 guys, too.) I also got a chance to meet and work with Drew Baldwin—he was the guy doling out the “missions” to Karen and me on camera—who would go on to cofound a company called Tubefilter, which operates the Streamy Awards. (Seriously: Internet? Very small world.) We shot somewhere in the neighborhood of ten or eleven episodes, all of which were distributed on the mini-site ATTLostinAmerica.com.

  Within two weeks of the show’s debut, however, Advertising Age ran a story about the apparent failure of the whole project: “AT&T’s iJustine Web Series Doesn’t Exactly Go Viral: YouTube Stars as Spokesmodels May Not Be Such a Great Idea After All.”

  Oh, man. It’s just positively gleeful, right? I mean, that headline is dripping with sarcasm. The article goes on to suggest that the show garnered around thirty thousand views across multiple social media platforms, including Myspace and YouTube (though the reporter didn’t have access to the analytics from AT&T’s mini-site). Since the clips I posted on my own channels often received many, many more views than that, the reporter from Ad Age interpreted that the show hadn’t been particularly successful. He extrapolated further that hiring YouTube talent was, basically, a giant waste of time.

  The thing is, I would’ve been fine with it if the point of the article was that the reporter just didn’t like me or didn’t like the show—I’d been doing this long enough to know that you can’t please everybody. What he was suggesting, however, was that because the show didn’t go “viral,” it wasn’t successful. It’s a viewpoint that represents a complete lack of familiarity with Internet distribution channels. It’s also a total misrepresentation of how the web works. Here’s why:

  Karen and I were hired solely as on-air talent—it wasn’t our job to blog or tweet about the show, or to upload promotional spots to YouTube. In other words, we weren’t hired as distribution avenues; we were hired to show up and deliver some lines. Most of us involved with Lost in America tweeted and blogged about it anyway, if for no other reason than that we were proud of our work. I posted a few behind-the-scenes-style vlogs on YouTube as well, because I figured my followers would be curious to know what I’d been up to and why I was traveling so much. Those videos, which weren’t mentioned in the article, pulled in somewhere around 120,000 views. Had the intention of the show been to create something viral—forgetting for a minute the fact that an eight- or ten-minute-long video is unlikely to go viral in any context—AT&T would have paid for the use of our online network. The point of the show, however, was to drive traffic to AT&T’s mini-site, which it did.

  If you’re wondering why any of this matters now, it’s because corporate America is still trying to figure out this whole Internet thing nearly a decade later. Frantic articles keep getting published about the fact that, among American teenagers, Internet personalities are more recognizable and more influential than even the biggest Hollywood celebrities—but when actor and comedian Kevin Hart asked to be compensated to tap into his personal social network to promote a movie, a studio executive (in a private email that was later made public in the 2014 data hack of Sony Pictures) called him a “whore.”

  I get it when people say, “How hard is it to send a tweet?” What I think people sometimes fail to understand about amassing a following online, though, is that if you want to build an engaged audience (and Kevin Hart, by the way, has nearly 17 million Twitter followers), you have to provide consistent content—whether that’s makeup tutorials, music video spoofs, absurdist comedy sketches, or clips about dancing in Apple Stores, you have to be true to your brand. What you can’t do is spam your own accounts. It’s why I posted two episodes of Lost in America to YouTube, and only two—any more than that would’ve felt like I was clogging my channel with promotional material, which isn’t what my subscribers signed up for. The minute someone like me stops creating consistent, reliable content, they’ll start to lose their audience. I imagine that’s what Kevin Hart meant when he said publicly, in response to the insult from the Sony exec, that he was “protecting his brand.” It’s the reason I’ve turned down lots of jobs over the years—I refuse to give up control over what I post on my own accounts. To an outsider looking in, it might be hard to understand why more than 7 million people would watch a video of a girl explaining her trouble trying to order a cheeseburger, but that doesn’t mean that my followers—anyone’s followers—are mindless lemmings. It doesn’t mean their loyalty is fickle. On the contrary, that audience took years and years to build. Losing that audience, on the other hand, can happen much, much quicker.

  I mean, if it were that easy, everyone on Twitter would have an audience of millions.

  • • •

  Of course, not everything I’ve worked on has been successful. In fact, a number of projects I signed up for turned out to be—in 2008—a little ahead of their time. For example, I was hired to host a biweekly music video show on a new platform called PluggedIn.comII (despite the fact that, as previously mentioned, I knew nothing about music; I swear I took the job because someone said I’d get a chance to meet Will Smith—his company provided venture funding for the site—but that never happened). PluggedIn was supposed to become the Hulu for HD music videos—but it never quite took off. I’m not sure the resources were there, or that the company could afford the necessary bandwidth.

  I was also a huge supporter of a site called DailyBooth, where users could upload a daily photo and receive comments—it was not unlike YouTube, albeit with less barrier to entry because you d
idn’t have to shoot and edit a video. I felt about DailyBooth in 2008 the way I felt about Twitter in 2006; I was sure it would take off—but it never did. Instagram, however, launched two years later, at the end of 2010, and exploded.

  I’d even argue that AT&T’s Lost in America was a little too early, in that people weren’t yet consuming content the way they do now, without distinguishing between shows that were made to air on television and content that was created explicitly for the web.

  By the end of that year, however, another shift was occurring on the Internet landscape. The gap between the online world and mainstream entertainment was slowly starting to close.

  * * *

  I. See what I mean? Three million tweets a day, and most people I spoke with still hadn’t heard of it.

  II. This was a completely separate venture from the current iteration of PluggedIn, which is owned by the socially conservative group Focus on the Family.

  GOING MAINSTREAM

  YOUTUBE WAS SUCCESSFUL PRETTY MUCH right from the start, growing quickly and steadily following its launch in 2005 to become, far and away, the most popular video-sharing site on the web. But 2009 was a watershed year—the platform, now the fourth most popular site on the entire Internet, was exceeding a billion views a day, changing the way we consumed content. Not only were more people watching videos online but they were watching those videos for longer periods of time. More people were creating and uploading their own original content, too. By the middle of that year, President Obama had launched his own channel. So had the pope.

  As a result of this growth, YouTube began courting the content providers that had helped to make the site so popular in the first place. (Even though music videos received the most views, content creators like me had the most-subscribed-to channels, which makes sense when you think about it—we’re constantly churning out new clips, often on a near-daily basis; by contrast, pop stars might release, at most, three or four music videos every year.) One way to do this was to allow us a share of the ad revenue; I’d been a member of the Partner Program since 2007, the year of its inception. Another was to help drive traffic to certain channels by promoting “featured” videos on the YouTube home page—it was in YouTube’s interest, in other words, for its native content creators to do well. So whereas I had once focused my attention on sites like Revver and Viddler, I began to think of YouTube as a more primary destination, kind of like a home base. The more traffic increased to the site as a whole (and, downstream, to our videos in particular), the more revenue content creators like me received. For the first time, I had some real financial stability. On YouTube, I could suddenly make a decent living.