Tyler Oakley

SocialBlade, a website that rates YouTube and Instagram accounts, ranks his YouTube channel,, with a grade "B", subscriber rank of 1,434th, video view rank at 7,022nd, and a SocialBlade rating of 345,254th.

he also had more than 5.6 million followers on Twitter and 5.6 million on Instagram.

Mathew Tyler Oakley (born March 22, 1989) is an American YouTuber, actor, activist, author, television personality and Twitch streamer.

Much of Oakley's activism has been dedicated to LGBT youth, LGBT rights, as well as social issues including health care, education, and the prevention of suicide among LGBT youth.

Oakley regularly posts material on various topics, including pop culture and humor.

Mathew Tyler Oakley was born on March 22, 1989, in Jackson, Michigan.

He has twelve siblings.

When he was an infant, his parents divorced.

When he was in the sixth grade, Oakley moved to Okemos, and became involved in choir and drama.

As a teenager, he had bulimia nervosa.

Oakley came out as gay in high school.

Oakley graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in communication, marketing and social media from Michigan State University.

While in college, he fell into a short depression after a breakup with a long-term boyfriend.

Oakley admits he considered suicide at this time.

His college years were also when he first became involved with YouTube, using the video sharing website to communicate with his high school friends, who were attending different schools.

Oakley is an active user of many 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 English-Irish boy band One Direction and television presenter Jerry Springer.

Oakley is known for receiving attention from major celebrities and organizations, such as Liam Payne from One Direction, Chris Colfer from the television series Glee and the restaurant chain store Taco Bell, namely on the social network Twitter after commenting on a previous tweet of theirs or tweeting about them.

Due to Oakley's success with social media and prominence among many social media platforms (particularly YouTube), he was given the opportunity to meet U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House.

He did a video with First Lady Michelle Obama talking about education issues.

Oakley attributes his success only in part to 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."

He sees Ellen DeGeneres as a role 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."

Since uploading his first video in 2007 while a freshman at Michigan State University, his YouTube channel has garnered over 683 million views, and, at its peak, had over 8 million subscribers.

From March to October 2013, Oakley co-hosted a weekly pop-culture news update – "Top That!"

– with Becca Frucht for PopSugar.

From 2013 to 2014, he performed the voice of Mr. McNeely in five episodes of the comedy web series The Most Popular Girls in School.

He has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and Tumblr.

He was featured in the 2014 Frontline investigative report "Generation Like", a follow-up on how teenagers are "directly interacting with pop culture" to the 2001 report, "The Merchants of Cool".

The Advocate in their 2014 "40 under 40: Emerging voices" says that, due to Oakley's presence on YouTube, he is the first openly gay person that many people have met.

Oakley is considered one of the world's leading Celebrity influencers, having an Influencer Score of 99 from the influencer marketing software Klear.

In 2014, Oakley premiered a live show tour, "Tyler Oakley's Slumber Party", featuring him in pyjamas and doing skits, and interactive segments with the audience.

His two initial shows in Chicago and in Royal Oak, Michigan in early October both sold out in 72 hours.

In 2015, he released his first collection of humorous personal essays under the title Binge, via publishers Simon & Schuster.

Oakley was the host of The Tyler Oakley Show, which aired weekly on Ellen DeGeneres' ellentube platform.

In 2017, he was named in Forbes "30 Under 30".

In December 2020, Oakley announced he was taking an indefinite hiatus from making Youtube videos.

He is currently actively streaming on Twitch, and sporadically uploads on YouTube.

Oakley appeared on the YouTube Premium show Escape the Night, appearing as "The Thespian" for 10 episodes in Season 2.