Meet the Auckland YouTube Trio That Has Five Billion Views and Fans Around the World
They have been mobbed by fans at American gaming conventions, recognised on the streets of cities they had never visited before, and they have racked up more than five billion views on YouTube. But in their home country of New Zealand, Viva La Dirt League are still something of a well-kept secret.
Adam King, Alan Morrison, and Rowan Bettjeman make sketch comedy for gamers and internet enthusiasts from their purpose-built studio in Henderson, West Auckland. The group launched their main YouTube channel in 2009, posting short, funny videos about the peculiarities of gaming culture and the everyday absurdities of life online. What followed was a slow build that eventually turned into something extraordinary.
As of mid-2025, their main channel had accumulated more than 7.27 million subscribers and 5.29 billion views. A second channel dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons content added a further 467,000 subscribers and tens of millions of additional views. Their audience, as King told RNZ, skews heavily international. “Most of our audience are in America, then there’s a large amount in Europe and a fair amount in Southeast Asia,” he said.
Before the trio had their own space, they filmed from houses, cafés and improvised Auckland locations, making do with whatever was available. That changed when they took their ambitions to Kickstarter. They had hoped to raise $500,000 to fund a proper studio. What they received was far beyond anything they had anticipated.
“We ended up raising $4.5 million and managed to get ourselves a very large studio out west,” the group said. The result was a modern film production facility in Te Kōpua Henderson, developed in partnership with Auckland Council, which helped identify a suitable building. The team purchased the site in 2022 and began an extensive renovation to bring it up to standard as a working film studio, a transformation detailed by The Spinoff.
The three founders came from different corners of the New Zealand media industry. King had worked as a director at TVNZ, Morrison had been a video producer at NZME, and Bettjeman had a background in acting. Between them, they brought together storytelling experience, production skills and performance ability, a combination that turned out to be well-suited to the short-form video format that would define their success.
Their content tends to centre on the frustrations and absurdities familiar to anyone who has spent time playing video games. Characters die repeatedly, face impossible quests, or interact with the unresponsive logic of the gaming world. The humour is built around the gap between how games work in theory and what players actually experience, a vein of comedy that has proven to have near-universal appeal among gaming communities across the globe.
That appeal has translated into a real-world celebrity that still seems to catch the group off guard at times. At a recent gaming convention, the trio required a security escort, a level of attention more familiar to mainstream pop stars than to a group of filmmakers from West Auckland who got their start shooting sketches in borrowed locations around the city.
For all that international recognition, the domestic profile remains surprisingly modest. New Zealand audiences have tended to discover Viva La Dirt League through the same online channels as their overseas fans rather than through local media, which has historically been slow to treat internet content creation with the same seriousness it gives to film or television.
That may be beginning to change. NZ on Air, the public broadcasting funding agency, has come on board to support the group’s most recent project, a series called The Internet’s Guide to Mental Health. The project draws on a body of work the team have built up over five or six years, during which they created around ten or eleven sketches exploring mental health themes.
Their approach to the subject is characterised by the same wry, deflating humour that defines their gaming content. A recent sketch titled The Menu took aim at the tendency of online mental health discourse to reduce complex human experience to simple, shareable messages, a satire that resonated with audiences who recognised the gap between how mental health is discussed on social media and what people actually go through in daily life.
The NZ on Air support represents a meaningful vote of confidence in what Viva La Dirt League have built, and an acknowledgement that their work carries genuine cultural weight, even if New Zealand has been slower than the rest of the world to notice.
For King, Morrison and Bettjeman, the journey from scrappy Auckland upstarts to global internet stars with billions of fans has been anything but conventional. They built their audience video by video, sketch by sketch, without the backing of a major studio or the support of traditional broadcasting infrastructure. What they had was a precise understanding of what their audience found funny, and the persistence to keep making things until the world caught on.
With five billion views and counting, it would seem the world has caught on indeed.
Have you heard of Viva La Dirt League? Are you a fan of their work? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.