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Charles Joseph “Charlie” McDonnell (born 1 October 1990, also known as charlieissocoollike) is an English teenager and YouTube vlogger from Bath, Somerset. He is the third most subscribed YouTuber in the United Kingdom.

He first came to prominence when a video entitled “How To Get Featured on YouTube” was indeed featured on YouTube’s homepage. Prior to this he had fewer than 150 subscribers, but this number increased dramatically, skyrocketing to over 4,000 in a matter of days. In celebration of gaining 25,000 subscribers, Charlie has asked for challenge suggestions from his subscribers, and he completes them in a series of 25 videos entitled “Challenge Charlie”, or CC. He has completed eight so far, one of which was suggested by Phillip Schofield and his daughter Molly, for Charlie to do the dance that accompanies the Hoedown Throwdown. He also used to video blog every week on another YouTube account along with four other YouTube personalities. The name given to this collaboration by McDonnell is “fiveawesomeguys”, a spin-off of the American “fiveawesomegirls” collaboration. In a vlog posted on 28 October 2008, he announced that the project was set to end on New Year’s Eve 2008. The project is now officially over, although a few members mentioned they may still post on the channel. Charlie has since posted a large range of videos on the site, including his most viewed, “How to be English”.

On 6 August 2008, Charlie showcased his musical talent with a song titled “Blink”, based on the Doctor Who episode of the same name. This song was in the musical genre “Time Lord Rock” (or Trock, shortened by the same convention as the Harry Potter fandom’s Wrock), which was named by Charlie’s friend Alex Day (known as ‘Nerimon’ on YouTube). Alex wrote the first song, “Awful Lot Of Running”, to be classified as Trock, and “Blink” was the second. They have also have a song titled “Exterminate, Regenerate”. (Although Alex Day did invent the label Time Lord Rock/Trock, he did not invent the concept of writing songs about Doctor Who. Fans of the long-running series have been writing songs about it since shortly after its inception in the early 1960s, including the hit single “Doctorin’ the Tardis” by The Timelords.) Since its conception, Time Lord Rock has been mentioned in Doctor Who Magazine. Chameleon Circuit, a Trock band consisting of Alex Day, Charlie McDonnell, Liam Dryden, and “Ginger” Chris Beattie, released a self-titled album on 1 June 2009.

On 30 September 2008, to celebrate his 18th birthday, Charlie and his friend Alex Day dyed and then shaved their hair off whilst live on blogtv for a period of 7 and a half hours, in aid of Cancer Research UK. They managed to raise £4884.19. The broadcast viewership peaked at 4,500. Another friend, Jazza John McMillan-Clenaghan (known as ‘Rhymingwithoranges’ on YouTube) promised to shave his head if they hit £4000 and did so about a month later with the help from Kristina Horner (known as ‘italktosnakes’ and Monday on the collab-channel ‘fiveawesomegirls’ on YouTube)[citation needed].

On 24 February 2009, Charlie dyed his entire body purple in his fifth challenge in a series of 25 in a video titled, ‘The Purple Man’. This video was unexpectedly successful and very quickly rose to his 2nd most viewed video of all time after being featured in the UK.

Charlie featured with three other YouTubers in the series Chartjackers on BBC Switch. The other YouTubers involved in the project are James Hill (Jimmy0010), Jonathan Haggart (JohnnyDurham19) and Alex Day (Nerimon). The Chartjackers project involves the four guys attempting to achieve a UK No 1 pop hit within 10 weeks using resources provided by other YouTube community members. Over the course of the project they will solicit lyrics, music, performers, stylists and so forth to record the song and video via the “Chartjackersproject” YouTube channel. Their progress is shown on brief BBC Switch updates on the “Chartjackers” YouTube channel.

In October 2009, Charlie was named as one of a number of YouTube users who would be participating in a project called “RNLI Shout”. The aim of the project is to raise money to purchase a lifeboat for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Since July 2009, an outro by Stephen Fry has been included at the end of Charlie’s YouTube videos.

On his “Twitter” page Charlie has received 42,020 (Oct 4th 2009) followers from advertising his page on his Youtube channel.

Charlie was interviewed on BBC News. He also participated in the Euro 2008 Zeitgeist Google conference, where he spoke about YouTube along with Mia Rose (miaarose) and Peter Oakley (geriatric1927). This was a conference to honour online users of popular websites[citation needed].

He was one of three online guests on the BBC chat show Lily Allen and Friends in 2008.

He was also featured in a recent advertising campaign for Confused.com, speaking directly to his camcorder about the savings the site offered and its new layout and ease of use. The clips featuring Charlie are integrated with similar testimonials from other ‘customers’, including occasional clips from other well-known Youtubers.

He featured as a guest on Robert Llewellyn’s Web series Carpool in the episode broadcast on 15 May 2009.

In Early June 2009, Charlie visited Los Angeles to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009. He attended Microsoft’s Xbox press conference, where ‘Project Natal’ was announced. Two days later, he was invited to a ‘special area of E3′ and was one of 30 exclusive people from around the world to try out Natal. He explained this in one of a group of videos he produced and uploaded to a new channel on YouTube for the trip called ‘CharlieAtE3