Tyler Oakley

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Tyler Oakley is a internet personality on the famous website, YouTube. Tyler Oakley was born March 22, 1989 in Jackson, Michigan. Oakley began making videos in 2007 when he was a freshman at Michigan State University. His first video has received over 70,000 views on YouTube. Through the years of his channel he has made over 300 videos, has over 212,000,000 views and over 4.9 million subscribers as of August of this year. Currently, he is described as having "one of the loudest voices on YouTube,". Bloomberg defines him as a "YouTube sensation." According to SocialBlade's Channel rating system, "as of February 2014, Tyler's YouTube channel holds a grade A, with a subscriber rank of 90th, a video rank at 1,412th with a personal SocialBlade rating of 151st. He posts regularly on several social networking sites, including: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers, especially on Twitter which he has more than 2 million followers."

Oakley supports The Trevor Project, an organization for the prevention of suicide in LGBTQ youth. LGBT youth is the group. He has interned with them in 2009 and since 2011 has co-hosted TrevorLIVE, which is the charity's annual red carpet event. In 2013 he raised $29,000 for his birthday for the Trevor project. Throughout March 2014 he conducted a birthday fundraiser for the Trevor Project, to celebrate his 25th birthday, using Prizeo, an internet platform that allows people to raise money through prize-based fan campaigns. Initially he aimed to raise $150,000, the escalation of his goal from the previous year when he aimed to raise $24,000 for his 24th birthday was due to the great increase in the size of his fan base in 2013. However this goal was surpassed in a six days and by the campaign close at the end of March he had raised $525,704.

I chose Tyler Oakley as my hero because as a person he is very caring, kind, intelligent, and good hearted. Tyler doesn't care about what people think of him and he makes it clear that he doesn't need anyone's approval to be himself. Many of his fans reach out to him and he responds through his videos that to just be you and love who you are because you do matter. He is an example of a successful, happy person because he lives his life to the fullest joined by some of his great friends who are other ''YouTubers'' such as Conner Franta, Troye Sivan, Marcus Butler, Alfie Deyes, Zoe and Joe Sugg, Caspar Lee, Tayna Burr, Jim Chapman, Miranda Sings, Shane Dawson, Joey Graceffa, etc. He is an inspirational person who is selfless at all costs. He is not afraid to speak his mind and can overcome any obstacle thrown at him. I admire him for never losing himself for his somewhat ''fame'' he has developed from YouTube. Hopefully Tyler's human nature which is so rarely found could influence more young people to stand up and make a change for something they believe in.