In 1995 an exotic dancer and nude model was active on Usenet, fans that had found her through magazine appearances, video tapes and strip club tours. She had fostered an online fan club from the comfort of her own home. It hadn’t been long since she had had a run in with the law. A club owner encouraged her to perform topless and to sell her soft-core videos at his establishment - neglecting to tell her that doing so was illegal in the non-nude club. Abandoned by her agent and the club’s owner, and with her clothes stolen in the process, she was taken directly from the stage to jail by 13 police officers. Following what she would call “the most horrendous, humiliating experience of [her] life”, she decided to quit the circuit.
Online, she had found her fans were far more interested in her as a person than she had thought - and saw similar trends with the fans of other models. So, when her husband showed her his company’s new website, she had an idea. If fans were hungry for her then why not create her own website with what they wanted? It could be a better way to sell videos too - and importantly, she would have control over how she was presented, and no flaky agents or scummy club owner’s to deal with.
This was Danni Ashe. A self proclaimed “geek with big breasts” who was “obsessed with the computer”, Ashe hired two seperate programmers to realise her vision, but they both failed to create what she wanted. So, realising that no one but her could do it, she took a copy of The HTML Manual of Style and Being Digital to the beach and learnt how to build the whole thing herself. Initially her site only featured pictures of her, and the ability to buy physical videos, and she would upload and quickly remove the images (fearing she’d chew up too much bandwidth). However, the fleeting content wasn’t enough for fans, who quickly told Ashe that they would happily pay a monthly fee for the images to remain up - the online subscription was born.
When she went to get hosting, she warned the provider that her expected traffic would likely need it’s own server, and placing her site, Danni’s Hard Drive, on a shared public server wouldn’t be enough. The provider waved her concerns away and assured her that she didn’t, and that she was getting ahead of herself - that was until imediately after launch, the traffic to her site overwhelmed their server and forced them to do what Ashe had suggested in the first place.
Ashe was a fierce innovator, and saw through tech fads and all the rage that was fledgling e-solutions. In terms of business, it’s no wonder her company thrived - they saw the mess that was video online, and built DanniVision - an actual web player that just worked without the hassle of managing multiple plugins (a problem of the time). Her company developed ways of processing credit cards that protected them from chargebacks and fraud before anyone else, before the smartphone she had a mobile site, and her hosted videos were better quality than big media outlets like NBC and CNN.
Beyond this, Ashe notably approached her site in a way unlike so many before and since - she really wanted to create a fan club environment and not just a sleazy content portal. She described her sight as well-lit and fun, a place that didn’t leave you feeling ashamed or guilty for visiting - embracing the fantasy of fans over the simply explicit presentation of nudity. At the center was the models, the people behind the photos - Ashe gave them the opportunity to represent themselves as they wanted to*, with authenticity and humanity, sex-positive rather than (s)exploitative. Ashe was also articulate (even when her interviewers were not) when discussing her nuanced opinion on violent and distasteful pornography:
“[T]he Internet is almost like a parallel universe. It represents every possible human thought, feeling, and emotion, both good and bad, it’s all there. It’s a mirror of us. And sometimes, you know, we don’t like to see what’s there. […] In our culture, we repress a lot of sex, and we repress our anger, and what you see coming out is a lot of violent pornography. And, you know, it’s my theory that that’s a direct result of our culture’s repression. […] I think all media, including pornography, is a mirror of what’s going on in our collective subconscious. It’s something that’s surfacing in us, in our culture, otherwise it wouldn’t be there. And I think it has a lot to do […] about repressing sexual desires and anger. You repress them both, and all of a sudden it bounces back and in kind of ugly ways.”
Ashe drew firm lines on what her site would and would not host, but was not in favour of censorship generally. Ashe wanted the women in her industry to be at the center of the decisions made for and about them - and audiences preferred it; having a bio written by a horny magazine editor pales in comparison to the lady’s own words. Ashe understood what locked fans in, what made them return, not just what was eye-catching.
I think Ashe was fantastic, teaching herself HTML and building a website where strippers, porn stars and models actually had some control over their presentation. I generally avoid indulging in girlboss feminism, but I have to hand it to Ashe for one-upping the boys so massively, and doing it for the girls.
In the mid 2000s Danni Ashe sold her site and disappeared from the public eye. A once-hinted-at autobiography never materialised, and Danni.com (a.k.a Danni’s Hard Drive) traded hands a couple more times, filed for bankruptcy, and now ‘survives’ with a similar subscription model. Although the performers are no longer the heart of the site, there doesn’t appear to be any free content, and the site’s design is bland, joyless and uninviting.
It’s not unusual for women to be forgotten in history, those in porn and tech especially so. With that in mind, I wanted to quickly celebrate Danni Ashe, for being a geek, for trying to build a performer-first corner of the industry, and for doing more for the internet than a lot of more famous names in tech have even come close to.
* Today, many ex- and current porn stars have websites in their name that they have zero control over, and make either no money or a pittance while the companies that seduced them into setting them up rake dividends.
Bibliography
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- Lewis, E. (2001). Danni Ashe: Danni’s drive to Net profits | The Independent. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/danni-ashe-danni-s-drive-to-net-profits-5547114.html [Accessed 30 Jan. 2026].
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