iJustine: From Geek to Internet Celebrity

Forget going from rags to riches, the hot story these days is going from geek to internet celebrity.

Justine Ezarik, a 25-year-old video blogger and marketing genius living in Los Angeles, has successfully catapulted herself into internet celebrity status by using her geekness to stay on the cutting edge of technology. She currently has over 100,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, 25,000 Facebook fans and over 600,000 Twitter followers. She uses her unique combination of beauty and brains to market herself, and with her determination and good business sense, she is beating all the odds.

It is clear that advertisers look at people like Justine as a new kind of media giant. After all, her following is the size of some cable channels on television. In June, Carl’s Jr., an American fast food restaurant chain, hired several YouTube superstars to create videos to promote their products. They were paid a flat fee for production and promotion and were given these instructions: Create a video to tell how you eat a burger and mention the product by name.

Justine, one of the marketers chosen, created this video below, which has been viewed more than 431,000 since it was posted in June. What’s the most attractive aspect for the advertisers? This type of advertising is very cheap compared to traditional advertising.

When Twitter was cyber attacked the beginning of August, Justine made it into the Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt from that article, “Justine Ezarik, a 25-year-old video blogger in Los Angeles, has developed sophisticated coping mechanisms for feeling connected to her more than 600,000 followers during outages. She said she usually waits and sits at her computer pressing refresh until it comes back again and writes down Tweets in her black moleskin notebook to save for later…” You can read the entire article by clicking here.

One of Justine’s most recent videos, featured below, posted only three days ago and already has over 830,000 views. I’m looking forward to following her career to see where her creativity takes her next! You can follow her on twitter at @ijustine.