Mathew Tyler Oakley (born March 22, 1989) is an American YouTuber, actor, activist and author.
Much of Oakley's activism has been dedicated to LGBTQ+ 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 queer politics, pop culture and humor.Oakley began making videos in 2007; his first video Raindrops had received almost 500,000 views on YouTube as of November 19, 2017.
Since uploading his first video in 2007 while a freshman at Michigan State University, his channel has over 673 million views, and, at his peak, over 7.5 million subscribers.
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.
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 November 19, 2017, with a grade "B", subscriber rank of 224th, video view rank at 2,010th, and a SocialBlade rating of 33,897th.
As of September 2018 he also had more than 6.2 million followers on Twitter and 6.1 million on Instagram.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.
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.