Danni Ashe
Career
Born Danielle Ashe, she began exotic dancing at seventeen in Seattle clubs before moving into magazine modelling and softcore video work in Los Angeles. In July 1995, after teaching herself HTML over a few weeks, she launched Danni’s Hard Drive — later Danni.com — one of the first paysite-model adult websites on the internet. She ran it as CEO through the site’s peak, when it employed fifty full-time staff out of a 16,000-square-foot Los Angeles studio and posted a reported $6.5 million profit for 2000. In March 2000 she testified before a COPA Commission panel in San Jose on marketing adult material online, one of the first adult-industry executives to appear before a federal body in that capacity, and in August 2000 Guinness named her the internet’s most-downloaded woman. Arena magazine ranked her fourth on its list of the fifty most powerful people in porn in 2003. She sold the company to John Morisano in 2004; Penthouse Media Group bought it outright in 2006 for $3 million.
Signature: She taught herself to code specifically to get out from under other people’s distribution deals, and the business she built from that decision outlasted her performing career by roughly a decade.
Index score — The Pornstar Ranked Performer Index v3.0
Beyond performing
- Founder and CEO, Danni’s Hard Drive / Danni.com (July 1995 – 2004)
- Testified before a COPA Commission panel on online adult marketing, March 2000
Mainstream credits
- Guinness World Records — most-downloaded woman on the internet (August 2000)
- Ranked 4th, Arena magazine "50 Most Powerful People in Porn" (2003)
- Subject of the 2000 book My Year in Smut
- Featured on PBS Frontline and HBO’s Pornucopia
Official links
No official accounts confirmed. We only list handles we have verified on an authoritative page — a guessed handle in this industry usually belongs to an impersonator.
Appears in
Ranked alongside
Sources and verification1 source
- Exact year she stopped performing as a dancer/model
- No independently audited total for site revenue beyond the reported 2000–2001 figures
