Tyler Oakley (born Mathew Tyler Oakley March 22, 1989) is an American YouTube and podcast personality, humorist, author and activist. Much of Oakley's activism has been dedicated to LGBT youth, LGBT rights, as well as social issues including healthcare, education, and the prevention of suicide among LGBT youth. Oakley regularly posts material on various topics, including queer politics, pop culture and humor.
Oakley began making videos in 2007; his first video Raindrops has received over 400,000 views on YouTube as of January 3, 2016. Since uploading his first video in 2007 while a freshman at Michigan State University, his work of over 399 videos has over 535,000,000 views and over 7,880,000 subscribers as of January 4, 2016. Oakley, who is openly gay, 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." 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." SocialBlade, a website that rates YouTube and Instagram accounts, ranks his YouTube channel, as of August 16, 2015, with a grade "B+", subscriber rank of 109, video view rank at 1,129th, and a SocialBlade rating of 1,329th. As of December 2015 he also has more than 4.8 million followers on Twitter and 5.7 million on Instagram.
As of March 2013, Oakley co-hosted a weekly pop-culture news update - "Top That!" - with Becca Frucht for PopSugar until October 31 when he announced his departure. From 2013-14, he performed the voice of Mr. McNeely in five episodes of the comedy web series The Most Popular Girls in School. has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and Tumblr. In 2015, he released his first collection of humorous personal essays under the title Binge, via publishers Simon & Schuster.