Tyler Oakley

Tyler Oakley (born March 22, 1989), is a 26 year old American YouTube celebrity, blogger, comedian & internet personality, known for mostly comedic vlog-style videos. Many of his videos are collaboration videos with other YouTubers. He has collaborated with fellow YouTubers such as Joey Graceffa, Shane Dawson, Hannah Hart, Miles Jai, Troye Sivan, Dan Howell, Colleen Ballinger (aka. Miranda Sings) and many more.

Oakley began making videos in 2007. Since uploading his first video while a freshman at Michigan State University, he has received over 330 million video views and gained over 6.1 million subscribers along with over 365 videos posted. He is a former member of the successful collaboration channel "5AwesomeGays," where he produced the Friday video for over three years. Currently, he is described as having "one of the loudest voices on YouTube," and Bloomberg defines him as a "YouTube sensation." His biggest fan was discovered in December 2014, who had found his address and gave Oakley a visit. She lives in Toronto, according to Oakley.

Since March 2013, he co-hosts a weekly pop-culture news update – "Top That!" – with Becca Frucht for PopSugar. He also does weekly "Q and Slay" videos where he asks people to send him questions on twitter and he tries to answer as many as he can. This was started on Jan. 25, 2013, but he stopped and finally made as a regular series on Oct. 28, 2013 He posts regularly on several social networking sites, including: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Oakley has a weekly podcast with his close friend and fellow YouTuber Korey Kuhl entitled "Psychobabble." It is free and can be found on iTunes.

Oakley supports The Trevor Project, an organization for the prevention of suicide in LGBT youth. He has interned with them, hosted a red carpet event and raised around $550,000 in support of their work. He has also interned at Bowery. Other ventures include: working as a resident mentor; teacher's assistant; product marketer/developer at Michigan State University; social media and communication manager at Chictopia; and director of social media at Good Ideas for Good Causes.

A self-proclaimed "professional fangirl," Oakley is a fan of Darren Criss, Lady Gaga, Betty Who, and the British-Irish boy band, One Direction

Social Media
Oakley is an active member across many of the most popular social media platforms. A self-proclaimed "professional fangirl," he is a fan of Darren Criss from Glee. along with Julie Chen of CBS's daytime talk show The Talk. He also sang Christmas carols on stage with One Direction and Jerry Springer. He also had confirmed that "He has a spot in his heart for Troye" on twitter, following the hashtag #Troyler. The tweet was deleted by Oakley due to his caution of drama, hate, etc.

Oakley is also known for receiving attention from major celebrities and organizations, such as Liam Payne, Chris Colfer and Taco Bell, namely on social network Twitter after commenting on a their previous tweet or tweeting about them. Due to Oakley's success with social media and prominence among many social media platforms (particularly YouTube), he was also given the opportunity to meet U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House. He also did a video with first lady Michelle Obama talking about education issues.

Oakley attributes his success only in part with his accessibility as a young gay man, "It's not all about me being gay. It's kind of like an underlying theme for me [with gay life] sprinkled throughout the videos."[1] He sees Ellen DeGeneres as a model, "She embodies what I want my experience to be and my influence to be, where it's a positive one, it's a happy one, it's not something about the bad parts of life or the downsides of a lot of things. She's using her influence for good, and everyone knows who she is, what she stands for, and that she is a lesbian."

The Advocate in their 2014 "40 under 40: Emerging voices" list says that Oakley with his social media efforts has become one of the first gay people you might meet or get to know. Knowing someone who is LGBTQ is a major factor they note to wider acceptance of LGBTQ issues like anti-bullying efforts, and gay marriage.

Tyler enjoys changing his hair color very much; he has dyed his hair many different colors from green to blue to pink. In 2015, Tyler attended the Grammys and interviewed many artists such as Sam Smith, and Lady Gaga.

Podcast
Tyler released his podcast "Psycho Babble" on September 2, 2014. He plans to talk unfiltered with other YouTubers (possibly celebrities) and just make people laugh. The podcast also stars Tyler's college friend Korey Kuhl. It is currently only available on iTunes, but for free.