July 30, 2003 05:15am
Danni Ashe Moves Into "Portable Porn"
Source: New York Post
by: Lauren Barack
Danni Ashe - a former porn actress turned popular Web magnate - has taken her show wireless.
Ashe's "Danni's World" is being tailored to allow customers to message in to chat rooms and view video images such as the site's naked joke - a daily joke read by a naked woman. The service will run $4.95 a month and also appear on Pocket PCs.
Popular soft-porn brands like Playboy have already made some of their content available over wireless networks - trying to take advantage of the growing medium.
Yet while analysts believe that there is money to be made by pushing adult entertainment on to cell phones, it may not be as much as expected.
Sites like Danni's World and Playboy.com will generate just 5 percent of all mobile entertainment revenue, or $1 billion, worldwide by 2008, according to a report from research firm Strategy Analytics. The firm believes that with so much pornography available for free on the Internet, it's going to be hard to lure users to pay for it.
Still, the industry appears to be growing.
"If the wireless Internet evolves in a similar fashion as the wire-line Internet, adult content will be a major driver at its introduction," said Linda Barabee, a wireless analyst at the Boston-based research house the Yankee Group. "U.S. wireless carriers have to walk a fine line between participating in substantial revenue opportunities and being branded as a distributor of what may be deemed controversial content."
Ashe, who launched her Los Angeles-based site in 1995 and watched it grow into a $8.5 million company with 45 employees, sees wireless as a natural extension of the Web.
"It took what the Internet offered, privacy and accessibility, and made it more portable," she said.
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