Thursday, I happened to notice that famous vlogger IJustine was on because around 3 PM, she was one of the "trending topics" on Twitter; she was on USTREAM.tv, doing a live stream from their San Francisco office. When I clicked in, she was talking about new iPhone apps, and how they work, or more to the point, trying to figure out how a particular app worked.
iJustine calls herself a "new media chick" and Apple fan girl who's Twitter profile announces that she is the Internet. Her real name is Justine Ezarik and since her first foray into "lifecasting" - which is a form of vlogging, kind of a live diary - with USTREAM, has become an Internet star largely because she embraces the medium and has an honest, tech savvy-yet-curious acting approach (Ezarik sees iJustine as a character who's most popular group are teenage girls, according to Gawker's famous blogger Emily Gould.) Having started with USTREAM, in 2007 she jumped over to the then-new competitor Justin.tv to become the new model of their lifecasting show process replacing the founder Justin Kan. In 2008, she rejoined USTREAM.
Ezarik's follower and subscriber numbers are just plain amazing: over 600,000 Twitter followers, 121,000 YouTube subscribers (like me, she's a YouTube partner, which means she earns money from her video views), and her YouTube videos commonly draw between 50,000 and 100,000 views in one week. She became famous after turning the camera on herself to show and complain about a 300-page iPhone bill from AT&T, which casued the company to alter its billing format.
Later, AT&T hired Ezarik in a new media initiative that failed to "go viral" as they expected. It's wasn't her fault, but borne of the fact that the phone giant didn't allow her to make the videos and keep them within her site and subscription system, in fact the best performing videos were those placed on her blog and YouTube channel.
The key to her success is that she's fearless: willing to turn the camera on herself without care for what others think. The result is she gains from the primal fact that we're all voyeurs wanting to look into the lives and habits of other people. Ezarik gives the public want it wants.
What the public wanted today was iJustine on a live stream and that's what they got. Because of her use of her base of Twitter followers, she was able to drive her name to near the top of the "top trend" subjects, but failing to replace "Harry Potter" in the number one spot.
The lesson for media types is this: get a small camcorder and practice talking into it, downloading the video, editing it, and then posting it on YouTube, or Blip.tv. Then do it again and again and consistently, developing a following over time, join various social networks, and establish a blog to promote what you do. And most important is not to care what people are going to think; that's the one dynamic that stops many in this area of endevor.
