Easy Access
by Kitty Bowe Hearty

Ex-stripper Danni Ashe cleans up on the Internet

Danni Ashe hit bottom at a Jacksonville, Florida strip club in 1994. A feature dancer in an elaborate 20-minute show, she was arrested on stage for "baring my breasts in public," she reports. After spending the night in jail, she pleaded guilty, paid the 50-dollar fine, and left in borrowed clothes. "At that point I needed to be in control," she says. Flash forward to 1999: Ashe is in control and riding high as the founder of Danni's Hard Drive (www.danni.com), one of the most popular -- and profitable -- of the many cyberspace sex sites. The 31-year-old ex-stripper and softcore porn star started the California-based Hard Drive in 1995. Today her site, which includes nude stills of herself and 250 others, plus six live video feeds, averages 7 million hits a day, has more than 27,000 subscribers, and is projecting income of $5 million this year.

This kind of success is hardly surprising given the level of her committment. After firing two different designers, Ashe built Hard Drive solely on what she learned from reading an HTML manual.

After only one day, she also learned the price of success -- 70,000 hits resulted in her being pulled off her public server.
She spent the next six months building a pay site and continues to put in long days as she devises different ways to diversify and expand her business. Ashe is the first to admit that she misses the days she spent in front of a live audience. "I really loved the dynamic of meeting my fans." Now those fans interact with her on a daily basis via their computers, which translates into the kind of profits that even the big boys (and publications like The Wall Street Journal) notice. Before the web site, I had been moderately successful as a dancer and model -- but I was never a player in the industry," she says. "To feel your own standing changing -- it's amazing."


Notorious Magazine - June/July/August 1999

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