Danni Ashe (born January 16, 1968) is the
pseudonym[Danni Ashe quoted on p. 232 of E. Ross & A. Holland, 100 Great Businesses and the Minds Behind Them, Sourcebooks 2005.] of an American
nude model and former
stripper, founder and former
CEO of
Danni's Hard Drive, a pioneering adult
web site.
Biography
Ashe was born in
Beaufort, South Carolina, United States.
Her naturally large breasts (cup size 32FF)
[Tom Ehrenfeld, "Just Managing: The Naked Truth About Danni's Hard Drive", The Industry Standard, retrieved 2008-07-12.] contributed to her popularity as an adult performer.
Early career
Ashe began working as a
stripper in
Seattle. Never finishing high school, she started stripping at the age of seventeen using a fake ID.
["The Brains Behind the Boobs", Wired News, 1999-01-28; Gabriel Spitzer, "Danni Ashe on making it in the web porn biz", Media Life Magazine, 2001-03-16; both retrieved 2008-07-12.] In an interview, Ashe once explained her career choice: "I guess I'm an exhibitionist. But that's not quite true. Part of the reason is that I developed huge breasts at an early age and breasts are a very sexualized thing. At an early age I was getting a lot of sexualized attention. Eventually, I just felt that stripping kind of put all that stuff out on the table."
[Bruce Kirland, "Sex does sell at Cannes", Jam!, 2001-05-19, retrieved 2008-07-12.]
After about five years of working in Seattle clubs, Ashe moved to Los Angeles and began modeling for
men's magazines and
soft-core pornographic videos.
[Spitzer, "Danni Ashe on making it in the web porn biz".] She eventually worked as an
exotic dancer in various
strip clubs throughout the United States as a featured performer. This resulted in an incident in a technically non-nude club in
Jacksonville, Florida. In interviews,
[AINews, "An InnerView of Danni Ashe", 2000-01-24, retrieved 2008-07-12.] Ashe has alleged that the club’s owner and its manager persuaded her to perform a
topless dance, and encouraged her to sell
softcore videos of herself at the club. Ashe was subsequently arrested. Ashe pled guilty to “prohibited conduct” and was fined $50. Neither the club nor her
agent helped her through this incident. This unpleasant experience marked a turning point in her career; Ashe never again performed as a stripper, seeking instead to work in an area where she would have more control.
The Internet and beyond
Her first online activity was confined to
Usenet newsgroups during late 1994 and early 1995.
[2002 interview with Frontline, retrieved 2008-07-12; AINews, "An InnerView of Danni Ashe".] In the spring of 1995 she decided to create her own website when her husband Bert Manzari
[Kirland, "Sex does sell at Cannes".] — then a senior vice president of the
Landmark theater franchise
[Ehrenfeld, "Just Managing: The Naked Truth About Danni's Hard Drive"; Roger Ebert, "Hard Driving a Hard Bargain", May 1997, retrieved 2008-07-12.] — showed her his company's new website.
[AINews, "An InnerView of Danni Ashe"; Ebert, "Hard Driving a Hard Bargain".] When she could not find anyone competent to help her design her own site as she had envisioned it, Ashe read
The HTML Manual of Style and
Nicholas Negroponte's
Being Digital during a vacation. On her return to the U.S., she created the
Danni.com website in two weeks. The site was launched in July 1995 and contained content exclusive to her. Ashe announced the website to her friends prior to travelling to
New York with her husband. News of the site spread rapidly. When she reached the hotel in Manhattan, Ashe had a message from her
ISP stating that the volume of traffic her site received had overloaded their servers and caused their system to shut down.
Danni.com was moved to its own server, which became famous for having a "working" light that never went out. Ashe jokingly described her server as a "hot box", and when she started charging a fee for access to the site, she named the members' area "The HotBox".
By 2001, the website had made a profit of $6.5 million the previous year and was estimated to be worth 30 million dollars. Ashe was considered the most downloaded woman on the internet with her image being downloaded a billion times.
She is the only woman in the world who appeared on the cover of both the
Wall Street Journal and
Juggs magazine.
Ashe's business grew, allowing her to hire staff and models. By 2003, she had 50 full-time employees, a studio in Los Angeles (16,000 square feet (1,500 m²), and an archive containing hundreds of thousands of photos, and thousands of hours of video. That year,
Arena magazine ranked her fourth among the "50 Most Powerful People in Porn" list
["The Porn Power 50," Arena Magazine, October 2003.]. Ashe was making a million dollars a year.
Danni's Hard Drive was sold in 2004 to John Morisano. In 2006, Penthouse Media Group Inc bought Danni.com and Video Bliss Inc. (owners of the website) for $3 million.
See also
