She's Asian-American and lives in California, is a member of Mensa, played piano at Carnegie Hall at age 13, attended Rutgers University on full academic scholarship with a double major in business and Japanese, her idol is Warren Buffett, she's the world's best online Unreal Tournament player**, she has four networked PCs with a whole bunch of peripheral goodies, has built and maintains her own personal website that has so far been visited by (last time I checked) 18,809,293 adoring fans, she studies the stock market and quantum physics, and... SHE'S ONE OF THE WORLD'S HOTTEST PORN STARS! (** note from me2: Asia never claimed to be the world's best player. she just showed the reporter that time when she did hold the #1 rank for a while)

That's right, she's Asia Carrera, and if anyone challenges the myths and preconceived notions people have of the adult entertainment industry, she does.

As a veteran of over 250 movies since she began her career, Asia is now one of the hottest tickets in the industry, and if you've ever been into the adult section of your video store (and I know you have), chances are, you're alrady familiar with her work.

After buying her first PC in 1995, Asia set about creating her very own "scrappy little homepage," planning a simple site with pictures of her pets and vacations, an "online scapbook" like so may other amateur sites. But, as she quickly discovered, the topic of what she does for a living attracted an enormous number of surfers, and the positve feedback she received from fans motivated her to dedicate the time and energy needed to turn her little site into an online marketing success story.

Although she admits to being painfully shy (avoiding public appearances wherever possible), Asia stars in up to two movies a month, and as well as spening most of her waking hours maintaining her website, she's tried her hand at scriptwriting, directing, producing, editing, lighting, grip work, art direction, video box cover design, and, she writes and performs music for her own films!

After producing half a dozen movies of her own in the 90s, she decided that the returns didn't justify the time and energy put into it, and now only owns sole rights to only one of her films.

"Eventually I got fed up with trying to collect from overseas buyers and having to deal with bootleggers selling my titles and other headaches, so I began selling off the rights to most of those titles piece-by-piece. There's a lot of rights to be sold, between domestic and foreign, hardcore and softcore, cable and pay-per-view, DVD, internet, compilations, still photos, etc... and at this point, the onlu title I still own in it's entirety is my baby, 'A is for Asia.'"

During an industry wide AIDS scare a few years ago, Asia took a year off from making movies, and just worked fulltime on her website. She found that there was no financial downside to this at all, and it has probably assured her of a more lucrative and more long term income than if she had been concentrating on making movies during that period.

Of her website income she said "I sell far more pay section memberships than merchandise orders, but the merchandise orders are far more profitable, so in the final tally, both areas of my site earn about the same amount. The best selling merchandise items right now are DVD’s, which outsell videos and everything else by about 2-to-1." Of these, "A is for Asia," which she wrote, starred in, produced in 1995 for US$30,000, outsells all other asia merchandise by about 10-to-1. She’s planning a sequel.

"I also have my fingers in a couple of other pies, licensing my image to some up-and-coming companies in exchange for IPO shares and/or royalties, but I’m not a liberty to discuss any of those projects just yet… I also have deals with various toy and novelty companies who sell ‘Asia Carrera’ whips, dolls, and the like, and I’m working with another company on creating an Asia Carrera Online Casino."

Because of her popularity, and the high quality of her website, Asia has not had to revert to the classic site marketing and promoting tactics, email and newsgroup spamming, ad banners, webmaster affiliate programs, link trades and the like, and in fact does not even have a links page on her site. She says "All I do is try to keep my site listed near the top of all the major search engines, so that people can fine me if they want to. One thing I do have to my advantage is that I work my ass off to keep my site free, interesting, and updated, and those efforts get rewarded with the best kind of advertising possible- voluntary, non-reciprocated links from admiring webmasters, and word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews by impressed fans!"

Although she doesn’t trade link with other webmasters, over 1000 sites on the net have links posted to her home page, something she is very proud of. "Because that means the quality of my site has transcended the standard webmaster protocol of ‘I’ll link to you, if you link to me first,’ so right now, I’m pretty content with the quality and quantity of my site’s traffic."

As a bona-fide Unreal Tournament addict, Asia says she spends an embarrassingly large number of hours a week playing online. "I could check my stats and tell you an exact number, but I don’t really want to know." But after reaching number one in the world recently (out of about 10,000 players) playing UT hasn’t been such a priority for her anymore. "Basically, once you’ve reached #1, it’s kind like ‘ok, been there, done that… now what? y’know? The driving need to reach the top has been satiated."

Due to her growing popularity, Asia has become more ofa recluse in recent times, especially sicne the posting of photos of her without make-up on her site means she is recognized nearly ever time she leaves the house. She dislikes flying intensely (even more so now after September 11), and tries to avoid any and all public appearances, with the exception of the annual CES show in Las Vegas, which is practically mandatory for the whole industry. Most of her movies are shot in LA, and because of her big name status (she is one of the highest paid free lancers in the business), she can afford to be choosy about the work that she does, and has generally stuck to "couples-friendly" features, with a decent storyline and budget. "As my name got bigger, my rates increased, and now I don’t have to turn down work too often because the smaller companies and crappier productions know they can’t afford me, so they won’t even bother trying to hire me."

Asia invests in the stock market, and is an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal and anything about her idol, legendary Wall Street wizard Warren Buffett, about whom she says, "He’s brilliant, witty, focused, modest, wealthy, successful, a workaholic, and he sticks to what he believes in, even if it’s not always in agreement with what everyone else is saying or doing at the time." Being the market for the long haul, the recent tumbles haven’t made her want to sell off any of her portfolio, but admits she’s not keen to dump too much money into the market, "I’m not looking to outperform right now, just break even!"