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There’s Danni Ashe, a former stripper whose Culver City-based Danni’s Harddrive receives 5 million hits per day, which by comparison dwarfs the heavily trafficked sites of major corporations such as General Electric and Boeing. She expects to gross $3.6 million this year. There’s retired 25-year-old porn star Asia Carrera (whose film ‘A’ Is For Asia is not to be confused with the popular children’s book of the same name.) She claims to be a physicist’s daughter who as a teenage pianist once performed at Carnegie Hall and who now commands a popular Website from her home in the San Fernando Valley. And, among others, there’s Hollywood’s Hester Nash, 40, whose curatorial RetroRaunch.com has carved a niche in the high-end Internet porn bazaar. It offers an arty, historical collection of sensual materials for download that Nash proudly refers to as “a century of smut.” They’re among the vanguard of a boom industry if ever there was one. Online sex sites are conservatively estimated to have brought in $500 million last year, says Mark Hardy, an analyst with Forrester Research, which tracks Internet commerce. Interactive Week magazine speculates that the real figure may be twice that. Experts predict that cyberporn revenue will grow five-to-tenfold in the next decade. While Internet glamour stocks, such as Amazon and Yahoo, have become Wall Street darlings despite losing money, hundreds--if not thousands--of online sex businesses across the country are already turning a profit. In fact, except for a handful of mostly sports-oriented sites, sex merchants collectively represent the only industry group as yet not losing money in cyberspace, making them Web commerce’s dirty little secret. Media Metrix, The PC Meter Co., which monitors consumer activity online, says that in nearly one in four households where computers exist, Web surfers visit adult sites at least monthly. Popular sites such as CyberErotica and Ashe’s Danni.com consistently rank among the most frequented destinations on the Net. Industry sources say sex-related Web searches account for up to 20 percent of requests submitted to search engines. The sites typically offer photographs, videos, real-time video sex, or a combination of all three. Depending on where you look, from strange toe fetishes to Japanese girls who’ve just-turned-18, little is excluded. “You see it all, and after a while it all starts to look the same,” says Beth Mansfield, a onetime struggling accountant from Tacoma, Washington, who struck it rich with Persiankitty.com an online index of about 2,000 Web porn sites. She refuses to list ones that feature bestiality or child porn, although that doesn’t mean either are difficult to find elsewhere. In June, much ado was made in the media over the announced intention of two teenagers to have sex for the first time in front of a video camera hooked up to the Internet. It turned out to be a hoax. But had it happened, the event would have been a yawner for any regular partaker of online smut who, by means of live video streaming technology, can see couples engage in live sex acts day or night from locations in The Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe outside the reach of U.S. obscenity laws. In this country, the growing number of sex mavens equipped for live video must be more circumspect. But that hasn’t prevented video streaming from emerging as the hottest ticket item among the pornicopia of online products available. For a price, of course. At Internet Entertainment Group in Seattle, which provides live video feeds to scores of Websites that charge their customers up to $49.95 for a 20-minute show, owner Seth Warshavsky has converted a warehouse into a studio crammed with tiny rooms in which women (and some men) make naughty in front of cameras linked via the Net to the PCs of customers sitting at home. As part of a striptease, the women bump and grind and play with themselves. Computer operators in a nearby control room use an intercom to relay special requests straight from customers’ keyboards. “The most common thing,” says a Web mistress who subscribes to IEG’s service, “is for the girls to be asked to wave so that the guys know it’s really live.” As with much else in Web porn, size is no barrier to offering such services. Porn actress-cum-Web mistress Lauren Montgomery (like nearly everyone else in porn, not her real name) does the same thing from her home in the Santa Clarita Valley. That is, when she’s not shooting a movie or stripping at bachelor parties. “The technology is at a level where the screen resolution isn’t the greatest yet, but no one seems to mind,” says the 30-year-old former junior executive with the Walt Disney Co. She entered adult entertainment four years ago after becoming bored with corporate life. Her next project: installing a 900 phone number in her home to give video patrons the option--at a per-minute premium--to call in and talk while they watch her. Big enterprises such as Playboy and Penthouse, as well as film and video producers like Vivid, have revved up sizzling sites of their own to capture a share of the lucrative market. But the nature of the product leaves a wide berth for aggressive business types like Janey Huntington, a 46-year-old grandmother from Diamond Bar. She began posting pictures of herself on the Web two years ago and now features amateur models from around the world. Huntington declines to reveal figures, but her site has generated enough ad revenue to prompt her husband, Steph, to quit his executive job with a large company and help run Janey.com. Indeed, industry insiders say that of the estimated 45,000 Websites devoted to sex, many are managed by coeds and others who started the same way. While most may not approach Huntington’s success--let alone Ashe’s--many do well enough to help their owners earn a few hundred dollars a month in their spare time. “Sometimes I think everyone with a Website, a scanner, and a hundred bucks to buy a domain name has piled into the business,” says Mark Tiarra, who heads United Adult Services, a fledgling group that advocates self-policing of Internet porn sites.
In selling their wares, cyber-sex merchants have helped push the envelope of technology. Earlier pornographers gave a critical boost to the VCR in the early ’80s and later helped institutionalize video-on-demand in hotel rooms. Online purveyors pioneered the Web bulletin board, were the first to embrace credit cards for online payments, and the first to make commercial use of live video. That they’ve been able to rack up profits while many mainstream Websites continue to struggle may be summed up in two words: Sex sells. But there is more to it than that. Until a few years ago, buying porn meant taking the risk of being seen walking into a seedy sex emporium. Interactive porn meant hanging out at a strip club. With the Internet, adult fare is delivered directly to the desktop, at home or at the office. “It may not yet be socially respectable,” says Forrester’s Hardy. “But it’s universally accessible, and it’s private.”
In a skimpy Day-Glo orange bikini on the deck of her 48-foot ketch in Marina del Rey, Danni Ashe might seem like just another rich, young blonde bombshell out enjoying a breezy Saturday afternoon. Except that she is barely relaxing. On the way to the boat moments earlier, she has stopped at the offices of her Danni’s Harddrive and has made an alarming discovery. The receptionist who is supposed to be on duty is nowhere to be found. Now, with cel phone in hand, Ashe has tracked down the offending employee. With the delicacy of a velvet fist, she explains that there is no excuse for what has happened. “You understand that someone has to be in the office to answer the phones during business hours at all times,” she emphasizes. Maybe a worker’s sneaking home a few minutes early on a weekend wouldn’t have been a big deal a mere three years ago, when Ashe’s business was in its infancy. But things have changed. With 17 employees and $300,000 in monthly revenue, the 28-year-old former Seattle stripper’s phenomenally successful subscription-porn business has become an international enterprise. Fully 40 percent of the men who pay $14.95 a month to access her Hot Box of X-rated photo and video content reside in countries outside the United States. Like some CEO at a Fortune 500 company, Ashe keeps a close eye on the Asian economic crises (some of her best-paying customers are Japanese) in hopes that similar ills don’t dampen upscale consumer spending in Latin America, where she plans her next big push. So far, at least, there’s been little but good news. The growing demand for premium content on her free-to-enter Website--the result of what’s called upselling in the online biz--shows no sign of abating. In the last year alone, daily hits at the site have ballooned by a million, and her bread-and-butter subscriber base has zoomed from 17,000 to 22,500--despite a hefty 50 percent fee hike imposed in March for new subscribers. Having co-partnered with Playboy Enterprises to produce Playboy Harddrive as a regular adult cable feature, and with another cable program in the works, Ashe is on a roll. She’s also starred in porn videos, but confines her on-screen sex to women out of respect for her husband of seven and a half years, a senior executive with a movie theater chain. Forrester Research estimates that at its current growth rate, Danni’s Harddrive will top $9 million in annual revenue by the year 2001. That would keep it well ahead of the $6 million Playboy’s Website is projected to generate in 2001. With more than 1,450 channels of video sex and 20,000 full screen pictures, Ashe takes a backseat to no one on the Internet in the sheer breadth of smut she offers. |
