Justine Ezarik is best known by her August 2007 viral video called The 300-page iPhone bill. Everywhere else in the world, stories of unexpected billing issues began to popup in blogs and the technical press after the Apple iPhone's release, but this video clip brought the voluminous bills to the attention of the mass media. Ten days later, after the video had been viewed more than 3 million times on the Internet, and had received international news coverage, AT&T sent iPhone users a text message outlining changes in its billing practices.
She received her 300-page bill on Saturday August 11, 2007, and posted the one-minute video shot in a coffee shop to several popular Internet video hosting services by the following Monday. In the first week, the video received over 500,000 total views in several copies on YouTube, 350,000 views on Revver, 500,000 views on Break.com and 1,100,000 views on Yahoo Video, as self-reported by the four popular internet video sites as of August 22. 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, Fox News Channel, WTAE-TV, and WPXI-TV. ABC News Now also included independent reporting by an ABC News Radio reporter in their video interview.
In print media, the video's story was featured nationally in USA Today with independent reporting from major daily papers in New York, Los Angeles, and several other large cities in the U.S., and in the United Kingdom, even though the iPhone was not available outside the U.S. market at the time. 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. The rest of the video, set to the music used in U.S. iPhone TV commercials, shows her opening the box and flipping through the pages in fast motion, ending with the caption "Use e-billing. Save a forest." 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." She told the USA Today reporter, "This is so silly, there's no reason they need to send you this much information."
Ezarik is a heavy user who typically sends and receives tens of thousands of text messages a month, which generated an exceptionally long bill – 300 pages that had to be sent in a box with postage charges of US$7. In media comments Ezarik did discuss the amount due, saying her first bill was for US$275. "A lot of that was taxes, activation fees and pro-rated charges," she said. "I was shocked at how high it was." She had no complaints about the iPhone itself: "I made the video only to point out the comical aspect of my phone bill being delivered in a box. As for the iPhone? I love it."
Modified from the "300-page iPhone bill" article at Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Released under the GFDL.
Justine Ezarik is best known by her August 2007 viral video called The 300-page iPhone bill. Everywhere else in the world, stories of unexpected billing issues began to popup in blogs and the technical press after the Apple iPhone's release, but this video clip brought the voluminous bills to the attention of the mass media. Ten days later, after the video had been viewed more than 3 million times on the Internet, and had received international news coverage, AT&T sent iPhone users a text message outlining changes in its billing practices.