Ze skinny from famed stripper turned entrepreneur

By Gabriel Spitzer
   
    According to Guinness, Danni Ashe is the most downloaded woman in history. On Dec. 5, 2000, she recorded her historic billionth download. That makes her several times more popular on the internet than her nearest female competitors, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears and Martha Stewart. Danni’s web site, Danni’s Hard Drive, is one of the oldest and most successful adult-entertainment sites on the web. She got into the business six years ago with nothing more than some racy pictures of herself and a do-it-yourself HTML guide.

Where does your business-savvy come from? What’s your background?

   I started stripping when I was 17. I worked off and on in various clubs around Seattle for about five years, and then I moved to L.A. and started modeling. From there I became a feature dancer for a short period of time. 
    That meant I would travel around the country and be the headliner at various clubs. It didn’t last very long at all.
    I never finished high school. I got a GED and went to a couple of years of junior college, so it’s definitely not from my education. 
    I’d say it’s more blind determination and being a bit like a pit bull when I decide I want something. 
    I got fixated on the internet and I knew I wanted to be involved. I sort of taught myself everything I needed to know.

There doesn’t seem to be much brand loyalty in the adult entertainment industry. How do you keep your fans so loyal?

    There are plenty of strong adult brands in the publishing and video worlds, but for whatever reason it hasn’t happened that way on the internet. 
   What most have done is really a game of pushing traffic around.
    There are four main models in the adult internet industry:
     1) There are free sites who trade traffic with other free sites, then sell off some of that traffic to pay sites.
     2) Other sites are big link-hubs. All the free sites send traffic into the hub, then the hubs will send some new traffic back.
     3) The pay sites buy traffic through affiliate deals, where other sites send them traffic and the pay site tries to sell them subscriptions. 
     The rate is about 3.5 subscriptions per thousand visitors. Obviously that’s pretty low. So it becomes even more important to move more traffic.
     4) Then there are the content syndicators. They put together pieces of content, live feeds, photos or whatever else, that they sell to subscription sites. So there are many sites who do not produce original content, and those people don’t develop brand loyalty.
     How DHD has done it differently is that we produce a lot of our own content, and we try to produce a much more friendly site. 
    It’s my goal for people to feel good about their experience; I don’t want them to feel bad about what they’re doing. 
    I want it to be a light, bright, well-lit place.

What are the trends in the business? Is there a lot of consolidation, where bigger companies are scooping up mom-and-pop sites?

     The business is hitting a point of saturation. Any scheme where you just keep moving people around like that is ultimately going to fail. 
    There is some consolidation going on, but not really with the smaller mom-and-pop sites. I don’t think anyone’s rushing out to buy Bob and Lisa’s homepage in Ohio. I’d say 90 percent of the industry is made up of those small mom-and-pop sites.

There has been a lot of publicity lately about sites and groups of sites overcharging or defrauding customers in huge amounts. Is that something that has always gone on in the adult industry?

    There are a couple of really bad actors in this business, as there are in any industry. There are bad lawyers and bad doctors too. 
    It’s unfortunate that the bad actors in the adult internet tend to suit people’s stereotypes, so they get a lot of attention. There have been some companies that have abused the privilege of taking credit cards online.
    Visa and Mastercard are set up for face-to-face swipe transactions. Once you turn that into an internet transaction, big holes in the system present themselves, and the ones who get punished are the merchants.
    We’re all waiting in anticipation for a better system of payment over the internet.

The web grew up under Bill Clinton. Now that there’s a Republican in the White House, how will that affect online adult entertainment?

     I think it will be very interesting to see what happens.
     There are a lot of players in this business who are toning down in anticipation of problems. 
     But DHD is so far at the softcore end, I don’t feel like I would personally have a problem.
     I certainly censor myself all the time based on my own values and feelings about things. That’s really what we need.
     Government censorship is just an impossibility when you think of the global nature of the internet and the differences across cultures. It’s not like closing down some video store in Jacksonville, Florida. What the internet needs are better tools for parents.

Can you sum up your business model in a few sentences—are there any maxims or golden rules you run your business on? Anything that mainstream content sites can learn from?

    It’s a subscription model, but one sort of rooted more in branding than in the numbers game that most of the adult internet runs on.
    Our profit margins are about 25 percent, which is decent. In general we tend to be much leaner than a lot of companies because we don’t have a lot of VC behind us. 
    I have to be very realistic when I spend money about where it’s going to come back. I’m forced to be more practical and that’s why we’re profitable.
    The business is expanding, moving into other areas.
    Over the years we’ve developed a lot of technology to support the content on DHD, like credit-card processing, web serving, video streaming and security/fraud protection. 
    Some of those systems have gotten so good that they’re now worthy of being used by other, more mainstream companies. In the last few months we’ve taken in a number of clients.
    Danni is the only pure adult internet brand out there. Now we’re moving it into cable sales, pay-per-view, video/DVD and other ways of exploiting the brand on different media.
    As for me, I’m about to sign a book deal, and I’m going to Hong Kong to speak at the streaming media conference there. We’re working on a Japanese-language web site, we’re about to launch a video and DVD line, lots of deals.

It seems like your company is run primarily by women. How rare is that in this industry? How does it make you different?

    Initially, in the early days, the site was run entirely by women, and many of them came from the industry. It was very important in terms of building the company culture and our brand.
    Eventually, it functionally became a problem; all of anything is not good. It’s gotten to the point now where we’re a good blend of males and females, different backgrounds and countries. Our staff is very eclectic.

How did it feel to become the most downloaded woman in the world?

    It’s really fun. I got into this business because I have an exhibitionist streak in me, so it’s a real thrill to know that so many people are getting my pictures. It’s also very gratifying. It speaks to everything we’ve done and how I’ve poured my soul into it for the last six years.

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