Meet the three Kiwis who built a global media empire from west Auckland

A west Auckland studio, a global market

Viva La Dirt League is not a viral fluke or a celebrity profile. It is a working export business run out of Henderson by three founders who walked away from the institutions that trained them. Alan Morrison came from NZME, Adam King directed at TVNZ, and actor Rowan Bettjeman joined a couple of years after the pair started the channel in 2011. All three went full time in 2017.

Today their main YouTube channel carries 7.27 million subscribers and 5.29 billion views as of mid-2025, with a second Dungeons and Dragons channel adding another 467,000 subscribers and tens of millions of views. The comedy premise is simple: apply video game logic to the real world. They call themselves “a bunch of nerds who play games and make comedy sketches about games”. The business model underneath it is the story worth reading.

The market was never here

Back in 2023, the group noted that New Zealand accounted for below 1 percent of their total audience. For a traditional creative business that would read as a failure to build a home base. For a digital one it is the whole proposition. Distribution no longer requires geographic proximity to a major market. A sketch shot in Henderson lands in front of a viewer in Ohio or Manila at the same moment it lands in Auckland, and the algorithm does not care where the camera was.

That is a genuine shift in what a small country can export. The same skills that make a competent TVNZ director or NZME video producer can now reach an audience many times larger than either organisation commands, without the overhead and without the institutional constraints. Both TVNZ and NZME have spent recent years cutting costs and restructuring. The three people who left them built something that scaled the other way.

Discipline, not luck

The growth was deliberate. Morrison identified the turning point precisely: “When we were committed to doing three videos a week, the algorithm was like, okay, these guys are reliable and started to present us”. Consistent output signals reliability to any distribution system, whether that is a recommendation engine or a subscriber inbox. King described the trajectory as “a slow burn across our entire lifespan”, and pointed to variety within a niche as structural: audiences “don’t necessarily want you to just make the exact same thing over and over”. When gaming parodies stopped paying, they moved into short-form comedy. They followed the audience rather than defended a format.

The clearest proof of a durable business is who funds the infrastructure. Rather than living off platform ad revenue alone, the group raised $4.5 million through crowdfunding against a $500,000 target to build their Te Kopua studio. Fans who pay to build your production base are not passive viewers. That is audience ownership converted directly into capital.

Why the economics matter beyond one channel

Dr Kenny Ching, Senior Lecturer in Strategy at the University of Auckland Business School, argues digital creators are beating the studios on relationships, not budgets. “The YouTubers described above didn’t beat Hollywood by making better films than the studios. They did so by building deeper relationships with their audiences than the studios,” he wrote. A community, in his framing, “isn’t just a large number of followers. It’s an active ecosystem of people who create, critique, remix, and evangelise around a shared interest”. He also notes the barrier between amateur and professional production is “now completely blurred”, and that New Zealand’s small scale is an advantage for building high-trust communities rather than a handicap.

The macro numbers back him. New Zealand’s creative exports were estimated at over NZ$4.1 billion in 2022, the country’s fifth largest export earner, with creative service exports growing at 9 percent compound annually since 2015. The wider arts and creative sector contributed $18.5 billion to GDP in the year to March 2025, employing more than 122,000 people, and growing faster than the total economy.

What business should take from it

Viva La Dirt League is a case study in what digital distribution actually unlocks for a small operator. Own the relationship with your audience, publish with discipline, and let the platform carry you into markets no travel budget could reach. The team went from “a couple of hundred dollars a month into a multi-million dollar business” without leaving west Auckland. The question for policymakers and founders alike is whether the country treats this as an accident worth admiring or a model worth building around.

Sources

• Meet the Auckland YouTube Trio That Has Five Billion Views and Fans Around the World (2026-04-21)
• Slow burn: How a Kiwi comedy channel became a multi-million dollar business (2026-04-14)
• Kiwi YouTubers crowdfund multi-million dollar studio in Auckland (2023-09-03)
• What Hollywood can learn from the digital community (2026-06-17)
• Move over, Hollywood; build a digital community and they will come (2026-06-17)
• The digital natives blowing away traditional movie makers (2026-06-27)
• Creative Export Explainer (2025-03)
• Infometrics sector profiles 2025 (2025-03-25)