Betches CEO Aleen Dreksler on Staying Ahead of the Internet

Long before TikTok’s algorithm and the creator economy reshaped digital media, Betches was already helping define internet culture for millennial women. The site ( whose name riffs on “bitches”) became a go-to satirical destination for readers navigating early adulthood, dating and the particular indignities of modern womanhood. While many digital media startups from that era have fizzled out, Betches has thrived.

Childhood friends Aleen Dreksler, Jordana Abraham and Samantha Sage launched the company in 2011 as Betches Love This, a creative outlet they started during their senior year at Cornell University. What began as a blog has since grown into a massive media business spanning a website, social channels, podcasts, live comedy tours and three bestselling books, including Nice Is Just a Place in France, a satirical dating and lifestyle guide to behaving like a “betch.”

Its staying power is notable as younger audiences’ attention has increasingly fragmented across social platforms. More than nine in 10 U.S. teenagers use social media, while women are more likely than men to use visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, according to surveys. Betches has sought to meet that audience where it is, translating the voice and point of view that built its original following across new platforms and life stages.

That strategy has helped turn Betches into an acquisition target. In 2023, LADbible Group acquired the company for $24 million, with Dreksler remaining CEO. The company recently signed with CAA for representation across entertainment and media and has continued to broaden its portfolio with verticals including Betches Sports, Betches Moms, Betches Brides, Betches Travel and Bravo by Betches, alongside an expanded push into the U.K. Its podcasts have generated more than 40 million downloads, and the company says its newsletters reach 1.8 million subscribers.

In an August conversation with Observer, Dreksler discussed Betches’ origins, why its strategic shifts are a natural extension of its original mission, and what she makes of how Gen Z and millennial women consume content today.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Observer: Betches started as a WordPress blog. For readers unfamiliar with its origin story, how did it begin, and how has the company evolved since then?

Aleen Dreksler: I started this with my childhood friends. We’ve known each other since we were 10 years old, and we also went to college together. In 2011, during our senior year, we were living together, and it started somewhat accidentally. It was a creative outlet for us.

We made it an anonymous blog because, at the time, there was really no social media besides Twitter and Facebook. We were writing about the absurdities and realities of what it meant to be a young woman at that moment.

The first post didn’t go viral; it was every subsequent post. People started waiting for it, and we realized we had something. It took off right out of college. We did a New York Times feature that brought us out of anonymity. We had a book deal at 22, and I bootstrapped the business until we were acquired by LADbible Group in 2023.

Betches now reaches nearly one in two U.S. women, in part through its evolution from viral memes to video and other formats. What has driven that strategy, and why has it worked?

What we figured out through starting the company was that it was really about knowing and understanding young women to our core. Demographically, we had been growing, but psychographically, we understand the behavior of young women. The pivot over time was natural because, as young women, we have this instinctual understanding of them.

We pivoted even before we saw something coming down the line. When we started as a blog, there was no Instagram. We started our Instagram before anybody was really on Instagram. We wrote New York Times-bestselling books as 20-year-olds because that’s the core of the brand: being real experts and understanding how women think and act.

The core strategy was building the brand first. If Instagram disappears, we’ll still exist. People will still be our fans, and we will still be online for something like Betches on Broadway. That’s the core of it. The pivots are a natural evolution.

What advice would you give businesses that are still developing their audio and video strategies?

When we started audio, it was the end of 2015, and we started video the minute Instagram released a video feature. We knew that was what everybody was going to jump on, so we needed to figure it out immediately.

We had creators, but they weren’t even called creators back then. They were talented people we hired to be the faces of our company around 2015 and 2016. We’ve been creator-led since before people started calling it that.

Over time, we’ve developed a creative process within the business that brings together our creators—internal and external—who drive our intellectual property and shape the Betches universe. We call it the Betchlist. It gives the creators we vet and bring in a home on our platform. We watch them flourish in the process we’ve created, which allows us to discover new talent and create viral IP.

Jared Freid was one of our first talents. He randomly MC’d our first comedy show, and he introduced us to podcasts. He starred in our second podcast, U Up?, which is now our most popular podcast. We’re executive producing his second Netflix special, The Family Plan. [The show came out on Sept. 1.] That’s an example of the deep investment we make in our creators.

We also just launched an original scripted, multi-episode series on YouTube called Sisters, which is going crazy and is fun.

If I were to give any advice to businesses, it’s that even though all mediums and platforms are trying to be the same, they’re all so different. It’s very difficult to grow on all of them at the same time with the same strategy. If you’re just starting out, my number one piece of advice is to be hyper-specific about the audience you’re speaking to. Who are they? Understand what they want and how they spend time, then build for that platform first. Go deep rather than super wide.

Betches has also secured partnerships with brands that matter to its audience, including the NFL, Maybelline and Netflix. Why are these relationships important?

Our secret sauce is creating content that breaks through to young women. Many brands may not always know how to do that time and time again. They have products to sell. The brands we work with, like PepsiCo and e.l.f. Brands, trust us to speak their consumers’ and our audience’s language, and we create viral branded content.

One video we did with e.l.f. generated more than 4 million views, and it’s still climbing. The NFL came to us—as much as I love football—to be one of its first women’s media partners because, after we launched Betches Sports, it saw that it could have access to young women. It saw that and needed to keep it going. That’s what we’re continuing to do with them year after year.

Betches’ original audience was largely millennial women, and it has since attracted a significant Gen Z following. What do you see as the biggest differences in how those groups consume content?

Gen Z and millennials are more similar than you hear about. There are different types of content they prefer, different leaders they prefer, and different qualities—the texture, the ruggedness or the way something is executed.

But what I really think young people, millennials included, crave is content that inspires them, that they can escape with and that they trust. I believe trust is becoming one of the most important trends in news, not just because of A.I., but because of bots and algorithms. It’s an essential part of what we continue to lean into when building our young female community. They know we’ve got them. They can trust us.

Whether it’s millennials or Gen Z, women want personal content. We talk about friendships, which is in our DNA, and relationships outside of friendships where they feel seen and can laugh. We try to stay smart without being preachy, aspirational without being fake, and self-aware without taking ourselves too seriously.

We’ve found that bridges all of it. We try to understand the differences in how they consume content, but pay attention to the similarities and build for that.

Why does treating the community as a business metric help drive conversion?

We’ve always looked at our community as our north star. When we started the company, because we didn’t raise any money, I was so far removed from the media. What we believed was to make really good content and want people to come back on their own. That’s what makes them your fans. That’s always been obvious to me, and we’ve done that since the beginning. I think being outsiders to the media allowed us to have those blind spots.

From the beginning, we were always asking whether the content we were sharing was the kind that people would want to share with their friends. Now, entire algorithms are positioned around engagement because that drives more viewers. It’s obviously important for building a business, but it matters because that’s what building a community is.

We see our audience as fans. It’s a fandom, and we’ve seen them that way since day one. The community is the people who come back time and again and interact with each other. We had a podcast called Diet Starts Tomorrow, and our listeners would start group chats and WhatsApp groups together. I think they even went on vacation together.

That’s a real community you’ve inspired with your content. It drives conversion because you’re investing in the value of your consumer. Because we spent 15 years building that trust, our audience treats it like a tip from a trusted friend, which directly drives those conversions.

What’s next for Betches in three to five years? And what broader trends are you seeing in independent media?

We’re expanding our IP into longer formats and creating more real-life experiences. We are building out Betches Sports, our women’s sports platform. We’re going deeper with younger generations through Send Help, and we’re growing our footprint with Betches U.K.

We’ve just signed with CAA, so that partnership will help take our IP into television, film and global live events. That’s a dream come true for me. As mentioned, we’re executive producing Jared’s Netflix special, which is coming out in September.

Young women are becoming the leading economic force and audience source in the U.S., and Betches is positioned at the intersection of media and creators to capture that growth. More broadly, capital efficiency and access are becoming increasingly critical. It’s hard out there because you are constantly executing on social media every day for brands.

The independent media companies that do it well are the ones that care deeply about their users and audience—not just seeing them as a metric—and focus intensely on the user experience, marrying brand equity with real community.

Platform diversification is another huge piece. We’re already seeing social platforms evolve in unexpected ways, such as scripted premium shows launching directly on Instagram, which is something we haven’t seen before. YouTube is functioning more heavily as a social and discovery platform. Young women are going to become increasingly vital as they anchor that economic and cultural force in the U.S.