The stripper who ushered in the subscription-based internet

Summary

In the 1990s, nobody knew how to make money through Internet subscriptions. It took an entrepreneurial porn star to crack the code. The model for making money on the internet these days is straightforward, if difficult to execute: build an audience and charge subscribers for content. This is how OnlyFans influencers like Mia Khalifa have made millions. It’s how Substack writers like Heather Cox Richardson have become more influential and profitable than traditional media outlets. It’s not that different from “as a service” business models, which rely on marketing to build a customer base and then charge customers for a recurring online service. Who popularized this style of business? Who should numerous people and companies credit for determining how to make money online? All roads lead to an unlikely source: a stripper and softcore porn star who went by the name Danni Ashe. Ashe, who’s been lauded as the only person in history to be featured on the cover of both the Wall Street Journal and Juggs is the original internet subscription entrepreneur. But even as her pioneering business ideas have become the surest way for creators to make money online, she’s largely been forgotten. Profits and porn Ashe was born in 1968 in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where her father was stationed at a Marines recruit depot. Her parents separated, and she grew up in Seattle, starting a career as a stripper in the mid-1980s, at 17. “I remember feeling sort of very out of control of my own body, my own being,” Ashe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the early 2000s. “And when I started dancing all of a sudden I was sort of able to put myself back, you know, in control.” Danni Ashe, pictured here in 1997, was a renowned stripper before becoming an entrepreneur. (Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images) She worked in various clubs for the next few years before moving to Los Angeles to model for men’s magazines like Hustler and Playboy and act in softcore porn videos. Ashe also became a fe...