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1995 - present
The Fort Wayne start: Andrea Rose Russett was born in Fort Wayne on 27 June 1995, to Mark and Jacqui Russett, both graphic designers, and attended Bishop Dwenger High School until her junior year. In 2009, in her early teens, she entered a music video in a contest to meet Justin Bieber. The entry did not win, but it went viral, and her channel, GETTOxFABxFOREVER, was launched. Forbes profiled her at length in 2015, and Indianapolis Monthly counted her among its five Hoosier YouTubers worth watching in 2016, which is the record's evidence that the audience was built here first: she was a Fort Wayne schoolgirl with a camera before she was anything else.
Radio hires the internet star: In 2012 her first job was as a nighttime DJ in Fort Wayne, and she became, as Wikipedia records it, the youngest nationally syndicated radio host in the country. The trade understood what had happened before the trade had words for it: Mark Ramsey's May 2012 interview with Phil Becker, the general manager of Oasis Radio Group, is titled "Radio Hires the Internet Star", and Becker's group put her on HOT 107.9 because she arrived with an audience of her own, more than 250,000 YouTube subscribers, 32 million video views and more than 100,000 Twitter followers at the time of the hiring. Broadcast did not make her; it rented her.
The move and the second acts: In her junior year she signed with Fullscreen, the YouTube network, and moved to California. The acting followed the audience: Expelled in 2014, the thriller Sickhouse in 2016, which Fortune noted was released in brief increments through her Snapchat account, a distribution method with no precedent in this record, and a cameo in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. She has hosted the talk show Apologies in Advance since 2017, played the Mystic in Escape the Night's second season, and took a main role in Fullscreen's Guilty Party in 2018. In 2020 she turned to music, releasing her first songs, and in 2022 she began streaming on Twitch. The channel, now under her own name, stands at 2.74 million subscribers and 232 million views, as reported by Wikipedia, last updated 8 April 2026.
Sources:
- Wikipedia, "Andrea Russett" (born Fort Wayne, 27 June 1995; Bishop Dwenger; the 2012 radio job; YouTube information: 2.74 million subscribers, 232 million views, last updated 8 April 2026), and its references: Forbes, Michael Humphrey, "The Mass Education of Andrea Russett", 27 July 2015; Variety, Todd Spangler, 21 June 2016.
- Mark Ramsey Media, "Radio Hires the Internet Star" (May 2012): the Oasis Radio Group hiring and the audience figures at the time.
- Indianapolis Monthly, "Five Hoosier YouTubers Worth Watching", 13 June 2016; Fortune, Tom Huddleston Jr., on Sickhouse and Snapchat, 2 June 2016.