“I think, truly, my life calling is to make people laugh. I really think that that is my mission, just to bring humor and light and laughter to all situations,” says social media influencer Noah Miller.
A native of Portland, Oregon, Miller graduated from Cleveland High School in 2021. Miller has over 7 million followers across several social media platforms. His content is mainly comedy and lifestyle-based, and some of his most viral moments have become major social media trends. “(My content is a) combination of all the crazy social media and TV shows and movies that I’ve consumed my whole life,” he says. “It’s from social media, but not necessarily because of a trend that I saw on social media. It’s a lot of stuff that’s just stored in my head.”
Miller recalls his time growing up in Portland as incredibly unique. “I feel like I have a different perspective on that now that I’ve lived in another city,” he says. “I loved, loved, loved Portland’s access to nature … it’s unparalleled.” He also appreciates that he grew up in a very liberal city, something he says he often took for granted. Though Miller remembers Portland fondly, he still recognizes its faults. “(Portland is) the whitest major city in America … it definitely struggles with diversity,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I’ve started to kind of adopt the mindset of my parents, where they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s just not what it used to be.’” Miller is primarily known for his TikTok videos. Originally, he posted videos on other platforms, solely for his friends, until they convinced him to join TikTok. His presence on the app began to grow at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Miller cannot recall a specific video that jump-started his virality, but says that posting consistently helped him gain traction. “It kind of planted the seed in my mind that that was a place I could post stuff, like funny ideas,” he says. “After maybe two weeks of messing around on TikTok … I started posting consistently.” His videos gradually began to perform better, earning around 10,000 likes, then 100,000 likes and even more over the following months, until he accumulated over one million followers. Now, his follower count on TikTok has reached nearly five million.
The “Fifth Harmony Renaissance,” the “Doja Cat ‘Streets’ video” and the “rainbow crosswalk” are what he considers his most iconic videos. “I think those are probably my biggest three, culturally, too,” Miller says. “Those were just all so funny, and so completely off the cuff.” Gaining such a large following while growing up can be a difficult experience, especially when a worldwide pandemic and lockdown intensifies the challenges associated with both. Although it was foreign, Miller adapted and learned over time. “When everything shut down, I was very just normal and didn’t have much going on, and then when stuff started to open back up, I was suddenly kind of this public figure,” he says. “I didn’t really have anybody in my life to be like, ‘Oh, when this happened to me, here’s what I did.’”
In high school, Miller played soccer and competed in mock trial and speech and debate. Despite attending Cleveland, many of his closest friends went to other schools, such as Grant High School, Franklin High School, St. Mary’s Academy and Central Catholic High School. As his following grew, though, he began feeling a greater detachment from his school. “I was kind of disconnected later in high school … the more I got into social media, the less connected I was from school,” he says.
As Miller’s following rose across platforms, he began to get recognized in public more frequently. At first, it was difficult to grasp that he was a celebrity, because he felt so similar to his teenage fanbase. Along with getting recognized daily, Mill- er immediately noticed shifts in how people treated him, noting that those who once bullied him began asking him to hang out or to promote their songs or businesses on his social media. “I had kids that were mean to me in high school, that were like, ‘Yo, you’ve got to send me Charlie D’Amelio’s Snapchat,’” he says. “There was definitely kids that, if I didn’t have a big following on social media, would want nothing to do with me.” Although people Miller was not closely acquainted with began to change their attitudes when they saw his level of fame climb higher, his inner circle has stayed the same, and he has remained close with many of his friends from Portland.
In the fall of 2021, Miller started attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Among the cultural differences he noticed between Portland and Los Angeles were weather, diversity, size and people’s attitudes toward wealth. After graduating in 2025 from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications, Miller chose to stay in Los Angeles to continue his career on social media. “I’m really glad that I moved to L.A., and I’m really glad that I did it with the support of college with me, because I think if I had done a very typical influencer thing of (finishing) high school and just (moving) to L.A. with no plans … that would have been really bad for me,” he says. “I lived in Portland my whole life … So getting to L.A., I think that transition with UCLA, kind of doing it with me, that made it a lot easier to meet new people.”
Though Miller’s content on social media has stayed relatively similar over his more than five years as a creator, he’s gained a new perspective. He recalls that some of his comedy-style content was once built around sarcastically criticizing others, but as the job became more real, he felt inclined to move away from those types of videos. “My attitude has kind of shifted to more towards long-term,” he says, “Stop like, trolling and bullying people. Like, let’s try to make this like a serious thing.”
Miller has been able to turn what was once a hobby into a career, mainly through making promotional content. He has two agents and a manager who work with brand marketing teams looking to work with him for ad campaigns. Once the budget and structure of the campaign are confirmed, his agents work on negotiating contracts. Finally, the brand deal is presented to him in a “nice, buttoned-up email” with a plan of what his role would look like in creating the content. Miller typically agrees to brand campaigns. Sometimes, he also finds work from organic relationships through social media, public relations and marketing workers and friends. “I would say 80% of the time it’s through my representation, and maybe 20% of the time it’s through me, like, getting something from a friend, or there have been a few times where I’m like, ‘I really like this company, we should try to do something,’” he says, recalling a specific experience with a vitamin brand. “When I started getting sent the Lemme vitamins … I just started making videos about them, over and over, because I was like … ‘I want something to come from this. This is funny. I know I have an angle here.’ And then, later that summer, I got invited on a Lemme brand trip.”
In addition to the trip with Lemme, Miller was invited to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last summer, an international festival for people who work in creative communications and advertising held in France. “I was just like, ‘I feel so, so, incredibly lucky and grateful,’” he says. “I was just so in shock that my own work got me there and I was so incredibly humbled.” As both his number of followers and of viral moments have grown, Miller has begun to face almost constant public recognition. He says that, to varying degrees, he gets recognized “pretty much every time (he) leaves the house.” Additionally, Miller feels as though his identity as an influencer has been somewhat flattening, in that most view him as solely an internet personality rather than a multifaceted individual. “It’s given me maybe a little bit more anxiety than I already have,” he says. “It kind of creates sometimes this weird, like, ‘Are they looking at me because they know me? Are they looking at me because they like my shoes or like, do they think I’m attractive or something?’ It creates this kind of weird internal monologue sometimes.” Nevertheless, Miller says his prominence has never made him feel completely overwhelmed. “There aren’t really many times where I’m like, ‘This is too much, I need a bodyguard’ or something. I’ve never, ever thought about that,” he says.
With so much of his life being documented online through his videos, Miller sometimes struggles to form a balance between content creation and his daily life — finding time to “unplug” on a regular day or even during a vacation is a significant battle. “It’s really hard when your job is to film your life,” he says. “I feel like a lot when I travel, where I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m flying to this cool place. I want to vlog it. I want to make videos. I want to post on Instagram. I want to show everybody what I’m doing.’ But there’s another part of my brain that’s like, ‘Or you could not do that for like four days, and disconnect.’” Because of this, Miller has learned to set boundaries in his day-to-day life. He says, “After some experiences where I felt like interacting with fans was kind of taking me out of the moment of spending time with my family, I kind of made a hard boundary of ‘Okay, whenever I’m with my family, I’m still nice and respectful, but I kind of keep it short.’” He also says that finding time to be off his phone has helped maintain that balance, given that his job is wholly digital.
Miller believes that the “climax” of his career has already ended. He still enjoys making videos and would like to continue pursuing content creation as a career for as long as possible, but he acknowledges that social media is unreliable and not guaranteed in the long-term. In the future, he says he could see himself staying in the entertainment industry, but shifting to work behind the scenes: “I think my social media is as big as I want it to be,” he says. “I hate saying the word famous, but I think if I was any more famous, it would be scary. I don’t think I would like it.”
To Miller, his career has been incredibly rewarding — especially when someone shares that his content has made them laugh, inspired them or impacted their life positively. Being able to turn his personality into a career and create moments that people can enjoy has been fun and exciting. “For so long I was not proud or comfortable in my own skin, and to know that the tables have turned, and I’ve kind of flipped that on its head, and it’s now my freedom of expression is one, my job, and two, a source of laughter for other people,” he says, “I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m doing the best thing in the world.’”
