Philip DeFranco Wiki, Biography, Age, Family, Height, Net Worth, Fast Facts

Early life

DeFranco was born Philip James Franchini Jr. in The Bronx, New York City, New York. He has a stepmother who works at a car dealership. Once in Florida, he used his USF student loan to purchase a computer and camera. He is of Italian descent.

He has been a student at the University of South Florida, a biology student at Asheville–Buncombe Technical Community College, and later a junior at East Carolina University. In 2007, Phil was living in Tampa, Florida, and later Atlanta, Georgia. He also worked as a waiter in a number of restaurants while making videos in 2007.

DeFranco lived in a car until moving back with his father in Tampa, Florida, on condition that he would return to college, which he ultimately did not do.

YouTube

On September 15, 2006, DeFranco created his YouTube account during his finals at East Carolina University, originally registered as “sxephil”, in which he talks about “newsie type stuff, and things that matter to [him] today.” DeFranco has cited his influences as Ze Frank, Dane Cook, and the Vlogbrothers.^[ Early on, he began calling his news-centered videos The Philip DeFranco Show. All of his sxephil videos from before March 13, 2017, have been privated or deleted from the channel.

Before the YouTube partner program was available, he asked for donations from his viewers after claiming to have run out of money, and selling everything except his Mac, camera, and clothes, and overdrawing his bank account so he could spend a night in a hotel as he found it too scary sleeping in a car in Brooklyn.

An online viewer census from 2007 showed that one-third of his viewers were 16- and 17-year-old girls. In the same year, DeFranco opened his second YouTube channel, “PhilipDeFranco”, which includes a series of vlogs which he calls “The Vloggity”. He streamed on BlogTV twice a week and took a cut of the revenue which was up to $12 CPMs.

In August 2007, DeFranco conducted an experiment by uploading a video titled “Big Boobs and You”. The video’s thumbnail image was what the title described, except that the image only flashed for a split second. The rest of the video’s content was DeFranco talking. It quickly became his most successful video at the time, with 1.8 million views. From then on he changed his content to sex, gossip, and news. In 2012, YouTube redesigned their website, as videos with cleavage thumbnails attracted many clicks but were abandoned instead of being watched.

Personal life

DeFranco has polycystic kidney disease which he inherited from his father and grandfather.^[ He has a younger sister named Sabrina.

As of 2020, DeFranco lives in Encino, Los Angeles, with his wife, media literacy and mental health advocate Lindsay Jordan DeFranco (née Doty), and their two sons. DeFranco proposed to Doty, then his longtime girlfriend, on August 16, 2013, at his “DeFranco Loves Dat AZ” show in Tempe, Arizona. Their first son, named Philip James “Trey” DeFranco III, was born in 2014. The couple married on March 7, 2015, and it was captured on social media. Their second son, Carter William DeFranco, was born in 2017. In 2019, Lindsay launched Not So Fast, a media literacy campaign. The couple moved into their Encino home in late 2019 after previously living in San Fernando and Sherman Oaks.