How did three young women turn their snarky Instagram posts and celeb-gossip blogs into a successful global brand? Meet the meme girls who speak the language of millennials

It is the morning after the first American presidential debate. Hillary has, it is mostly agreed, won the round. In an office on Manhattan’s East Side, it is time for the morning “Instagram story meeting” at Betches.com. The assembled staffers all agree: the evening yielded two “momentous American moments” worthy of social-media comment. One was the travails of a female presidential candidate facing Donald Trump for the first time. The other was Rob Kardashian tweeting Kylie Jenner’s phone number.

“Two national-security breaches in one night,” cracks Samantha Fishbein.

“I think Putin was responsible,” says Jordana Abraham.

“No, the Chinese – it could have been the Chinese,” says Aleen Kuperman.

You can hear, in these jokes, that this trio of young women translate the absurdities of the political process into their own language – one of celebrity feuds and social-media memes, screenshots and snarky remarks.

They set about designing and writing the Instagram posts that will result. Somehow, this sort of activity fills entire days. After all, this is how Fishbein, Abraham and Kuperman – who began the company as 22-year-old Cornell students with no ambitions in the media – currently make their living: they run Betches.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Betches does politics. Photograph: Instagram

It’s hard to describe succinctly just what Betches is, because it’s a brand that has several faces. Betches is, for example, a website. Its tagline is: “Brutally honest news, gossip & advice for young women.” The website has fairly traditional blogposts on it, with such titles as Science Proves Fall Is the Best Season For Acting Like a Ho; Sarah Jessica Parker Admits Carrie Bradshaw Was Annoying AF; and What Your Dumb Tattoo Says About You.

Those titles alone will probably give a sense of the brand. The Betches are into pop culture. The Betches are sarcastic to a fault. The Betches enjoy the semi-ironic use of the word “ho”.

But the website is only the beginning. There is also a Betches Instagram account, which chiefly trades in snarky remarks pasted awkwardly over paparazzi and stock photographs. “When you try get out [sic] of doing PE but the teacher makes you wear all the lost property,” reads one post accompanied by a picture of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian dressed in Adidas pants. “U ever get stuck talking to someone who won’t shut the fuck up & start thinking about all the times u were alone & how u took it for granted,” reads another recent post, this one sans illustration. Or: “Live every day like you just found out you’re not pregnant.”

And then there are the Betches books, which keep hitting the New York Times bestseller lists. The first was called Nice Is Just a Place in France: How to Win at Basically Everything. The second was called I Had a Nice Time And Other Lies …: How to Find Love & Sh*t Like That.

The way to best describe their output is “content”. And the content is enormously popular. Their Instagram account alone boasts 4.5 million followers. Last month, their website got nearly 10 million page views and a million unique visitors. Plenty of this audience gets its news and entertainment through social media. And the Betches, being millennials – all three of the company’s leaders are now 27 – are very, very good at making content that appeals to other young women on social media. The most popular posts – the ones with the most likes and shares on Instagram, for example – tend to be the most sarcastic ones. A recent text-only post read: “The awkward moment when your sarcasm is so advanced that people actually think you are stupid.” It got 119,000 likes.

Though they decline to provide revenue figures, they say they’re making money. They haven’t seen any of the advertising decline that traditional media has, either. When I point out to them that this seems unusual, the Betches look at each other, and shrug. Perhaps it’s simply that they have mastered a form of social sharing very attractive to advertisers right now, though their sponsored posts on Instagram are often a bit limp: “(grabs popcorn) Catch a new episode of The Daily Show TONIGHT at 11/10c on Comedy Central #sponsored.”

The business has been profitable for going on four years, they say. They have four full-time employees – all white women in their 20s, like themselves.

There is a kind of uniformity to the Betches – so much so that I happen to notice that they are all wearing the same makeup look when I meet them: bronzer, heavy eyeliner, nude lip. Some of that is undoubtedly the product of all having grown up together on Long Island. But some of it is that the Betches know they have a particular sort of appeal, and they strive, they tell me, for “consistency”.

“Our fanbase knows exactly what to expect from us,” Kuperman explains.

They picked the name Betches because they were hearing it said by young women who didn’t necessarily want to call themselves “bitches” but who seemed to long for an alternative to bro culture.

Are they feminists? “That’s such a hard question. If you define feminism as all men and women should be equal,” Abraham says, “then yes.” “Empowering females?” Kuperman chimes in. “Then definitely.”

There is some explicitly feminist content on the Betches’ site. They mock Ivanka Trump for calling her dad a feminist. They cheer when … well, I’ll let the title do it: Bumble Totally Destroyed a Sexist Fuckboy, Yas Queen. (Bumble, for the uninitiated, is a popular dating app described as a “feminist Tinder”.)

But even the Betches themselves don’t think they’re as serious about these matters as, say, Jezebel. “They’re serious but making jokes,” says Fishbein, “but we’re making jokes and we’re serious.” How do Abraham, Fishbein and Kuperman see their followers, then?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Betches worldview. Photograph: Instagram

“Slightly narcissistic,” says Kuperman.

“Also fun,” Abraham interrupts. “They’re self-aware, and they don’t take themselves too seriously.”

“Self-aware is debatable,” counters Fishbein, adding that there is a portion of their readership that looks at the Betches’s relentless snark and wishes “they could be like that”.

The common denominator of all the Betches’s work could be summed up as smartass – the person at the party who always has something cutting to say. But one can’t help feeling that they’re not quite going for Dorothy Parker levels of wit. For all the Betches’s hundreds of blogposts and Instagrams and Snapchats and other assorted ephemera, there is very little that seems particularly original in its cleverness, or radical in its politics. Most of the jokes are the jokes you’d find anywhere on the internet. (In fact, in some cases, the Betches simply reproduce Twitter screenshots of other people’s jokes on Instagram.) Their own contributions are generally offered up in standard internet speak: “I can’t with this”; “Accurate”; “Whyyyyy”.

But they do not starve for – as people in the content business call it – engagement. And the living they make on that basis seems likely to be handsome. Most of their revenue, in fact, comes from advertising, Kuperman says. Then something like 35% of their income comes from their online shop. (It sells hats with slogans such as, “Not a morning person,” or T-shirts that read: “Drunk enough for pizza.”) Finally, the revenue from the book sales is ploughed back into the business.

They are doing so well, in fact, that they feel it’s time for outside investment. Their goal is to build their brand even further. “We want to be [a] household name,” Kuperman says. “I don’t want to talk to anyone and hear, ‘What is a betch?’ Or for them to mispronounce it.”