James Rallison American YouTuber With 20.4M Subscribers

Early life

Robert James Rallison was born on 14 May 1996 in Chandler, Arizona. His mother is the author Janette Rallison. He went to Chandler Preparatory Academy and to Perry High School in Gilbert, Arizona, and in 2018 he relocated to Glendale, California. He is known online as TheOdd1sOut.

Career

Rallison's first published work was a webcomic. He posted the first strip to Tumblr in June 2012, at sixteen. After a hundred strips he had gathered a hundred followers, and it took about another year for him to settle on his drawing style. His characters are round, white figures that he calls marshmallow people, and the comics lean on lighthearted ideas such as taking well-known puns literally. By September 2016 he had written around 400 strips.

On 30 August 2014 he opened a YouTube channel, first named theodd1sout comic. His animated videos use the same marshmallow characters and tell stories from his own life, together with his thoughts and opinions. The first upload was "A Book I Made as a Kid", based on a short story he wrote in elementary school. Growth was gradual and then fast: the channel reached 100,000 subscribers in March 2016, gained more than 278,000 in April alone to pass 400,000, and hit one million in July 2016. At some point he left college to make videos full-time. A second channel, TheOdd2sOut, launched on 2 December 2017 for non-animated content such as gaming, and passed a million subscribers in April 2018. The main channel reached 10 million in January 2019 and counted about 20.4 million subscribers by March 2025.

He has made two songs with music videos alongside other creators: "Life is Fun" with David "Boyinaband" Brown in July 2018, and "Good Person" with Joel "Roomie" Berghult in December 2020. His animated character appeared in the credits of YouTube Rewind: The Shape of 2017 and had a speaking part in YouTube Rewind 2018. In March 2019 he joined MrBeast's YouTuber Battle Royale video on a team with Jaiden Animations and Anthony Padilla, and he gave his earnings from it to Team Trees, the tree-planting charity campaign.

Rallison also writes books. The Odd 1s Out: How to Be Cool and Other Things I Definitely Learned from Growing Up came out in July 2018 and reached number 12 among trade paperbacks on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for the week of 13 August 2018. A sequel followed in March 2020, a doodle book in March 2022, a journal in October 2022 and Oddballs: The Graphic Novel in April 2023. He has also worked on the board games Can't Catch Harry and Cafe Chaos and released a mobile game, TheOdd1sOut: Let's Bounce!.

In June 2022 he announced Oddballs, an animated series based on his character, which premiered on Netflix that year. He is credited as a writer on it, as co-creator and executive producer, and he voiced the lead character, James.

Recognition

YouTube has presented Rallison with three Play Buttons: Silver and Gold in 2016, and the Diamond award in 2019. In 2017 a Collider writer included him among five YouTubers regarded as poised for mainstream success.