How to make $10M a year on OnlyFans–the pioneering legacy of Danni Ashe
Danni Ashe’s website, Danni.com, no longer exists.
Sure you can click the domain name and see pages with her pictures on them but that’s not what she built. The site has been sold, milked, polluted and watered down for two decades. (I just checked and they are still using the graphics my design team created 25 years ago.) Avoid.
Echoes of what it was survive at Archive.org if you reach back roughly 30 years. The first day has been lost to time, her site predates the Internet Archive, but about six months after their launch, and a year after hers, they took a capture, which qualifies as a legitimate piece of internet history.
I began working for her in late 1999, when the site looked like this and already had tens of thousands of members. It’s that site, built by Danni, I learnt so much from.
It’s all very NSFW of course (boobs, clearly the devil’s flesh) so don’t click those links if your company is stalking your internet use. The lessons it holds have nothing to do with the content she sold, and have impact far beyond it, but for those pure, or young, enough not to have visited this seminal adult site prior to the early 2000s, imagine a comic sensibility somewhere between Benny Hill and Hee Haw brought to life by a cast of strategically naked, gravitationally busty, young women. Then present it all at a resolution which only fills half your phone screen, with images the size of icons, and arranged using tables. I.e. cutting edge web design in the nineties before Zeldman cast his spell.
Today many adult creators are trying, unwittingly, to follow in Danni’s footsteps and some do pretty well. Making tens, or hundreds, of thousands a month on OnlyFans is not to be sneezed at.
However Danni did it on hard-mode, without a platform, building everything herself, from writing the pages to setting up merchant accounts and processing credit cards. Soon after launch her internet service provider reported that Danni.com drew more traffic than the entirety of Central America. An impressive boast, and a real problem when there’s no such thing as “the cloud”, and dealing with an increase in traffic means paying Dell another $15,000 for a server, and then charging an employee with physically installing it.
Despite this she built an empire employing over 50 people which paid twenty-something me, and a number of others, six-figure salaries–back when a couple of hundred grand felt like real money. She had a huge office and production studio near the Sony lot in Los Angeles and after all wages, expenses and rent were paid still made millions per year, as the boss, doing nothing more explicit than posing nude.
I’m not going to judge people who do sexual stuntwork, who tally ever more extreme feats to shock pseudo-prurient tabloid journalists into providing them with free publicity. It works, but Danni never did anything dangerous, or which she had to be ashamed of and she was taken seriously enough to have her Hedcut make the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t think it’s unfair to guess if asked “Who would you rather be?”, some creator making millions labouring under the 800th stranger to respond to a tweet, or Danni–who spent weekends on a yacht parked in Marina Del Rey and sold topless photos taken by her husband, what your answer would be.
She won. If you believe a woman can be sex positive, sexy, happy and in control there’s no better example. That she’s not the subject of a miniseries or movie is just proof that the American public still can only tolerate stories about sexuality if there are subtitles, or someone–preferably a woman who takes her clothes off–dies at the end. If there are naked people and money involved America will not tolerate happy endings.
As Danni’s Director of Marketing and Publicity I learned a lot. Here’s what anyone making content of any type, or who’s involved in entrepreneurship, should learn from what she did.
Prioritising ethics makes you money
As Danni built her site she quickly realised the key to keeping subscribers happy was supplying them with more content than she could herself produce. So she began hiring other models. Even when those models, inspired by Danni, built sites of their own they would still work for her in order to promote their site. As friendly competitors they were mutually dependent on each other. Danni got to keep subscribers and the models were exposed to a much larger audience than they themselves could muster. Danni took steps to ensure those vital relationships were good.
Most obviously was that she paid her collaborators really well. Not only was that the right thing to do, but it also worked as free marketing. People talk, and in a business as small as the adult industry everyone knew working for Danni.com was the easiest gig in town. In the early 2000s new adult performers were routinely paid $3-500 for shooting a hardcore scene by the big video companies. Danni was paying her models $2,000 a day for posing nude. Complete unknowns who she saw real potential in (those with a, ahem, “full balcony” as they say on the continent) would get flown in from all over the world, put up in a hotel with a travelling partner, and paid for days of photos at that rate. Finding talent never got hung up on terms, and given the choice between working for Danni and someone else the choice was clear.
Our air-conditioned studios on South Robertson Blvd. were designed to make people feel special. We employed professional hair and makeup artists, moonlighting from mainstream gigs, who made our models look as good as the actors and popstars they worked with when they weren’t with us. Food (or craft services) were provided in the same way, to the same standard, as on a movie and the temperature of the building was set so it was comfortable for people wearing lingerie or less.
It was a safe space and a great place to work. I remember the day one of the makeup artists, with a sideline as a go-go dancer, brought Britney Spears to the office in the morning because they’d been out partying all night. She wasn’t visiting a porn set, she was hanging out in a studio like the ones she shot videos in. Nothing felt off and no one batted an eyelid. It wouldn’t have been possible in the offices (and I saw them) of the big adult studios, bedecked with well-lit nearly nude portraits and tastefully lit in purple neon.
When the average hardcore set was a rented house, which smelt like a zoological clinic, and in which an open bag of communal M&Ms passed for lunch, Danni’s operation was, as John Winthrop put it, a shining city on a hill.
The other investment in the future I saw Danni make repeatedly was a strategic choice to lose money, if necessary in order to maintain a relationship. Sometimes people who model nude decide that later in life they want those photos gone. So many people in the 90s didn’t understand that on the internet things are forever, that magazines which had limited audiences when they agreed to pose for them would be scanned and uploaded, or that eventually everything once sold would be visible to all for free.
People would call and ask us to take down their content, and when Danni did a deal to start selling media shot for the web on DVD, and we informed the models involved, some didn’t want to be included. Danni had the rights to sell the photos and video she owned. The model releases were honest, fair and watertight (Danni had in-house counsel very early on), but in every case I’m aware of she chose to pull the content. To make less money and sidestep the risk of upsetting someone.
Those stories travel, and over time people are prepared to trust her in ways that are only possible if you have a reputation for doing the right thing. Her ethics paid.
Storytelling sells.
Danni got a herculean amount of press attention because she had a great story. Wikipedia has the bones of it (there are errors) and I’d refer you to the Wall St. Journal for a straight account of the early years. (It’s paywalled but there are archives out there if you dig.)
We got very good at telling that story and it was polished, embellished and birthed witticisms as we went. What I was surprised to learn is that the more widely it was told, the more other people wanted her to repeat it for them. There’s something very tribal and primitive about humans’ love of familiarity. It’s why popular songs are so repetitious, and why we love to repeat the same joke.
Though you’d imagine a need to have a story that changes, I spent years with news crews filming the same piece in the same way to get the same person to say the same words. It was as if each repetition validated the story and simultaneously provided a blueprint.
Of course it also helps when people can pitch your story for you. Startups learnt this lesson too. Ever since Pierre Omidyar’s PR lied about him building eBay in order to help his girlfriend sell Pez dispensers, entrepreneurs have understood that a compelling origin story is generally too good to fact check. Thus every new mindless SAAS platform, or tech-bro reinvention of public transport, comes with a gilded pile of horse-manure about an elderly aunt who wanted an AI video companion, or the need to ferry a disabled relative to church via delivery drone.
Danni’s origin story was true, but so well practiced and easy to relate that she got years of repetitious, glowing, coverage from reporters who wanted to hear it again. The impact of that coverage was seismic. We could tell when the TV aired a clip, or it was repeated, by looking at the server logs. From our office in Los Angeles an old repeat of Danni on The Howard Stern Show, or her appearance on PBS Frontline would ripple from New York, across the square states, and onto the best coast in ways we could ascribe a dollar value to.
In the adult space there are already a few stories. A couple of creators compete to sleep with the most people they can. Others target niches. There’s a varying degree of success with the press though and all coverage is not a positive. Go online and look at the rash of mini-documentaries about people trying to “sleep” with the most people in 24hrs. Not only are they all downbeat and sad, but this stunt isn’t new. A performer called Houston staged The World’s Biggest Gangbang III - The Houston 620 back in 1999.
Danni’s site was software and fun. It didn’t make women flinch and my own female friends, some of whom ostracised me after finding out I’d gone to work at an adult site, came around when they realised I was working for a feminist doing sex positive things.
There’s a huge gap waiting for OnlyFans’ Danni. Someone who’s respectable enough to invite onto a chat show, who can be part of a news article, who can speak for the industry in public, and who doesn’t have to explain what she does. Of course there will always be people who equate sexuality with sin and take the position that any acknowledgment of masturbation is deviant, but they are in the minority.
The most money you can possibly make as a creator is to be the person with the biggest possible audience. Everyone I know, male and female, who is attracted to women likes boobs, smiles and silly jokes - combined if possible. Very few, comparatively, crave images of tired young women struggling to have perfunctory sex with scores of average (I’m being kind) looking men for hours on end (sometimes both ends).
The audience you want to target isn’t OnlyFans or porn consumers. It’s the general public. You should build a story that can put you on the front of the Wall St. Journal and have you featured on TV in a story which makes people smile.
Learn Danni’s lesson[1]. Get rich.
Don’t look for keys under lampposts.
There’s a very old joke. Someone drops their keys at night and is trying to find them. Another person who’s been watching them search for 30 minutes approaches them and says “Why don’t you look somewhere else, you’ve been circling this spot for ages?”. The person looking for their keys responds “This is where the light is.”
For years VCs have fixated on university dropouts in the mould of Gates, Jobs, Wozniak and Zuckerberg in a cargo-cult like attempt to connect appearance and outcome. Meanwhile the best CFO I’ve had the pleasure of learning from worked for Danni. He had a significant disability and a brilliant mind. The kind of person who literally wouldn’t make it through the door of any company that hadn’t installed ramps and lifts, and from his wheelchair could run rings around 99.9% of C-suite finance execs.
Hiring whomever is under-appreciated or isn’t respected, gives you a massive advantage over competitors at war over mediocre candidates with the right look, background and paperwork.
For some people gender, skin colour, sexuality, disability or some other intractable part of their being means they don’t often get a shot. These people comprise an ever richer pool of distillate who are routinely overlooked by morons.
When Danni hired me I was on an H1-B, and in addition to my wages she needed to handle my visa transfer. Additionally I asked her to maintain and sponsor my green-card application as my prior employer had. Despite all this additional expense she said yes and, in return, got an employee who made some significant contributions to her success. When you are looking to build a team find the best people you can based on what they are capable of, not their similarity to people you think of as capable.
For creators in the adult space this is liberating. Being effectively barred from the mainstream by fear and social prejudice doesn’t put you on the B-team. It just means your A-team won’t look like theirs. Generally that’s a huge advantage.
Being early is easier than innovating
Inventing things is harder than being first to use them. Influencers know this but it works in any niche.
Danni was very early online, launching a site two years after the first practical web was released, and using newsgroups before that to run her fan club. Her communication skills, computer savvy and business acumen enabled her to thrive but it’s ridiculous to discount the impact that being there first had on her trajectory. An impact that multiplied with the launch of her website in 1995, and her pay site soon after. Having almost no competition to speak of is a massive advantage.
(N.B. It didn’t feel as if we were in a blue ocean back then, but looking back from today, when OnlyFans exists and competition is millions strong, makes the old internet seem deserted.)
Promotion today works the same way. A lot of guff is published about how the first people to blow up on any platform have a unique vision or talent. The truth is if you arrive early you get the lion’s share. Creators very seldom manage to repeat their success across media which proves the point. Every YouTuber and Instagram star took a shot at TikTok and despite a huge lead in terms of experience the people who dominate that platform were the first to devote themselves to it. If the old guard had won because of raw talent they could win again. That they didn’t tells you something.
If you race to uncluttered spaces you will be able to carve out a foothold orders of magnitude more easily than you will on an established platform. Conversely there’s a limit to what can be learned from focusing on atypical success stories. Overanalysing tiny differences seems scientific but is totally misguided.
That doesn’t mean the horse has bolted. People are hungry for talent and quality. The lesson to learn is that the ultimate potential of a new platform is less important than when you arrive on it and how well you adapt.
Twitter (now X) is a tiny social media site compared to behemoths like TikTok and Instagram, but as an entrepreneur the difference between 100M users and 1B is moot. You can thrive with just a couple of thousand customers and they can come from anywhere.
Jumping on the next new thing will pay dividends even if it’s not the next big thing. You just have to arrive on time.
I’ve predicted the adult market before, and am pretty good at it, and I predict that the current state of the adult space is temporary. Just as all platforms rise and fall (under 40 and spent much time on FaceBook recently?) OnlyFans will not be forever.
Just as journalists have learnt as newspapers have been swallowed by billionaires and cowed by government, the best path is always independence. Doing your own thing, the way you want to, via platforms you can control. Owning your own stuff works for Taylor Swift and it works for 404 Media - it can work for you.
Danni’s no longer the friendly face of the adult industry, but she made tens of millions (in 2025 dollars) being paid to expose just a hair more than Sydney Sweeney does on the red carpet today. The work involved was intense, but she stayed in control of her body, maintained her privacy and didn’t compromise her personal sense of dignity. What she did in the 90s and 2000s isn’t the past, it’s the future. Who’s going to follow in her footsteps?
Aella is likely the person who’s closest to capturing this market I can think of currently but, as a sex-worker and not just a model, is doing something which is commonly illegal and puts her on the outside despite her looks, intelligence and marketing brilliance. I’m talking instead about the kind of person Playboy used to fetishise. The girls next door who just happened to have a Scandinavian comfort with nudity. ↩︎