The stripper who ushered in the modern subscription-based internet

In the 1990s, nobody knew how to make money through Internet subscriptions. It took an entrepreneurial porn star to crack the code.

BY MARK DENT

The model for making money on the internet these days is straightforward, if difficult to execute: build an audience and charge subscribers for content.

This is how OnlyFans influencers like Mia Khalifa have made millions. It’s how Substack writers like Heather Cox Richardson have become more influential and profitable than traditional media outlets. It’s not that different from “as a service” business models, which rely on marketing to build a customer base and then charge customers for a recurring online service.

Who popularized this style of business? Who should numerous people and companies credit for determining how to make money online?

All roads lead to an unlikely source: a stripper and softcore porn star who went by the name Danni Ashe.

Ashe, who’s been lauded as the only person in history to be featured on the cover of both the Wall Street Journal and Juggs is the original internet subscription entrepreneur. But even as her pioneering business ideas have become the surest way for creators to make money online, she’s largely been forgotten.

Profits and porn

Ashe was born in 1968 in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where her father was stationed at a Marines recruit depot. Her parents separated, and she grew up in Seattle, starting a career as a stripper in the mid-1980s, at 17.

“I remember feeling sort of very out of control of my own body, my own being,” Ashe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the early 2000s. “And when I started dancing all of a sudden I was sort of able to put myself back, you know, in control.”

Danni Ashe, a blonde woman, sits, wearing a white bra under a tan blazer and skirt, holding a computer mouse.

Danni Ashe, pictured here in 1997, was a renowned stripper before becoming an entrepreneur. (Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

She worked in various clubs for the next few years before moving to Los Angeles to model for men’s magazines like Hustler and Playboy and act in softcore porn videos. Ashe also became a featured dancer at strip clubs across the country, earning her many admirers but putting her at the mercy of club owners whom she once referred to as liars and thieves.

To transition away from exotic dancing, she made the unorthodox decision to study HTML programming. With the help of a fellow former stripper who’d studied design at the University of Texas she launched Danni’s Hard Drive (Danni.com).

This was in 1995. Although the World Wide Web had existed for two years, nobody really knew how to make money off it, at least besides domain squatters, internet service providers like AOL, and browser providers like Netscape (which would soon be decimated by Microsoft).

Within the “information superhighway,” an old descriptor for the internet, those profiting were largely providing the highway infrastructure. Those providing the information — the content — weren’t nearly as fortunate.

Websites, from Snowball.com to BigBook.com to Women.com, drew millions of monthly visitors with forums, business directories, and articles, yet struggled to monetize with ads. Given the vast competition of the open internet, the cost of bringing in new visitors, and the reticence of traditional businesses to trust the web over radio and TV in those early days, sustainable ad dollars proved hard to come by.

The porn industry, though, was figuring things out. Many crucial online innovations were adopted and popularized by the sex industry before hitting the mainstream:

Secure credit card transactions
Age verifications
High-traffic servers
Video file compression
Video teleconferencing, with the proto-Zoom platform CU-SeeMe
Internet-controlled appliances (‘90s sex toys, such as RoboSuck and Digital Sexations, were plugged into computer ports and stimulated by users over the internet)

Ottawa Citizen via Newspapers.com

As far as revenue models, some sites like Playboy got so many views they could make a decent amount from ads, while other porn sites employed affiliate marketing (collecting a fee by linking to another porn site), or upsold images or sex products.

“Internet pornographers deploy savvy tactics that mainstream sites would do well to imitate,” noted the Wall Street Journal.

Soon, Ashe would contribute her own innovation.

The launch of the Hot Box

Ashe wasn’t all that successful in her first year, relying on page views and fan club sign-ups. But she pivoted to a subscription model in early 1996 based around photos and her personality.

The idea stemmed from some of her first experiences online, when she conversed with men about her work on message boards.

“What I was finding was all of these guys were fascinated with what I did for a living and sort of what made me tick and how the business worked,” she said. “And so there were a lot of questions about my industry but there are also a lot of questions about women in general. It's like, ‘What might I buy my girlfriend for Valentine's Day? How do I buy her lingerie?’”

So the site’s premium section, Danni’s Hot Box, priced originally at $9.95 a month, featured exclusive nude photos of her and other professional models, as well as interviews and chats — a proto-Only Fans that launched when the subscription internet was nearly nonexistent. (Even the Wall Street Journal, a famous early adopter of online subscriptions, didn’t add a paywall until 1997.)

A man on an early cell phone holds a credit card, while a television in the background displays an image of a person fishing with a shopping channel overlay.

People were going online in the ‘90s (and using obnoxiously large phones), but it was hard to make money. (Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Danni’s Hard Drive wasn’t the only porn site seeking subscribers. But other popular sites that charged for membership typically provided photos and videos without any distinction. Some just curated pictures from Usenet, an early message board system on which porn was rampant. They didn’t rely on a specific model’s brand and personality.

To some subscribers of Danni’s Hot Box, the interactions were more important than the nudity. “I think a lot of these guys have never even bought an adult magazine,” Ashe said in 1997.

The first year she introduced the subscription model, the site made ~$1m and took off from there:

In 1997, Danni’s Hard Drive made ~$3m, with revenues rising to ~$7m by 2000, with ~27k subscribers, according to claims Ashe made to the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle at the time. Ashe hired over a dozen employees, including a site editor who penned columns on subjects like Ken Starr and Bill Clinton, a talent coordinator, and workers who handled the development and design of the site.
In 2000, she was hailed as the most-downloaded woman in the history of the internet, with 840m downloads. Her website had ~2x the traffic of Oprah’s website and ~1.5x more than Martha Stewart’s, according to Alexa Research data.
Ashe became the go-to source for explaining how the adult entertainment industry conquered the internet, speaking at South by Southwest and on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.”

Ashe described her adult entertainment as coming from “a different point of view, from more a sort of human performer's point of view.” She referred to the site’s content as erotica, rather than porn, and attributed its authentic tone for its success.

“There’s an awful lot of content available for free on the internet,” she said. “I think people are interested in subscribing to my site because it’s a real environment. It’s all just a really fun, organized experience that’s all laid out for you. People are willing to pay for that.”

An illustration comparing the page views for [suspicious link removed] (25.1M), marthastewart.com (16.7M), and oprah.com (13.5M) in July 2000.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Subscribers, who lived across the globe, sent loads of fan mail, some of which was posted on a bulletin board in a Los Angeles-area office, according to site editor Taylor Marsh’s book The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen. Most letters came from the heart. Some featured…other body parts.

Marsh described Ashe in her book as “self-starting, determined, and difficult” and “a pioneer of the subscriber model that would become a craze.” Roger Ebert penned a column on Ashe in 1997 that highlighted her as the only person who’d figured out the path to sustainable online profits.

There was no question Danni’s Hard Drive came up with innovative ways to entice and keep subscribers. In 1999, the site hosted a live “Boob Bowl I” videocast to compete with the Super Bowl halftime show. Months later, the week taxes were due in 1999, Ashe and other models answered personal finance questions in the nude.

“This is a terrible week for millions of Americans,” the site advertised. “Sometimes, when your taxes and finances seem overwhelming, you just need to take comfort in some humongous breasts.”

‘What the internet allows us to do…is be in control of our careers’

Ashe’s penchant for being ahead of the times continued in the early aughts.

In 2000, she and her team developed DanniVision, an early streaming technology that allowed users to watch video (such as her online show “In Bed With Danni”) by clicking directly on the site without having to use a plugin like RealPlayer.
In 2003, four years before the iPhone, she launched a mobile website featuring thousands of photos and videos.

Danni Ashe sits at a desk, wearing a black blazer, with an old-style computer monitor displaying her website visible on the screen.

Ashe’s site made millions off subscribers in the early aughts. (Dan Callister/Online USA via Getty Images)

Ashe sold the site in the mid-2000s. Her insights eventually filtered into the mainstream. In the 2010s, most media companies finally began swapping ad-based revenue models for subscription models and building newsletters or websites around personalities. Influencers skipped the middleman and built audiences on nontraditional platforms — something Ashe had evangelized years earlier.

“What the internet allows us to do is build a name and notoriety, then be in control of our careers. It’s incredibly empowering,” she said.

After selling Danni’s Hard Drive, Ashe pulled off perhaps her most stunning feat: disappearing from public view. Scant online evidence indicates she lives in the western US and enjoys photography and hiking. The Hustle reached out to a phone number associated with Ashe but didn’t hear back.

As creators, writers, influencers, and businesses make money on the internet, they’d do well to remember the contributions of Ashe, a woman who experimented in the nude, so the rest of the internet could learn to operate in the black.