With the launch of Adult Cyber Mart I’ve become this web statistics junkie. And that’s how I discovered that Tanya Danielle and her website www.tanyadanielle.com are big in Germany.

Very big in Germany.

Maybe bigger than Pilsner. Why this is, Tanya has no clue, and this is the first she’s hearing about this. Maybe it’s because she reminds all those inveterate beer lovers of the St. Pauli Girl.

“Who knew?” she laughs.

“Do you know a lot of Germans?” she’s asked.

“I sure don’t. I had no idea.” she chuckles. “I notice I get some sales from Germany, but it doesn’t seem like an overwhelming number.”

“Maybe they like your physical type,” it’s suggested.

“I used to work for Score Magazine periodically and I remember them saying that. Score is devoted to women with giant boobs and one of their biggest markets is Germany,” Danielle continues.

First time I met Tanya was long ago when World Modeling was doing its cattle calls, and the late Jim Holliday happened to introduce us. She began dancing in the Nineties then moved over into the Softcore market.

“I didn’t do actual porn until around 2000,” she comments.

“When I heard that Jim Holliday passed on I was very sad. He was an interesting man but I wish I had known more about him.”

Danielle was a shy, studious kid who grew up in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles. She skipped a grade in school and because of that she was younger than her classmates and “socially awkward”.

“I was a very good student and that’s about all I had going on,” she goes on to say. “I would spend every recess and every lunch hour in the library.”

She did, however, participate in cross country and track.

“Were you socially awkward as well when it came to sex?” she’s asked.

“I veered toward normalcy rather than just being an isolated weirdo,” she answers.

“I went to a girl’s high school and didn’t do any dating. We had a ‘brother’ school where we did exchanges with them where we’d have dances or activity days. Most of the students were from Kuwait and lot of other Mideastern countries. But those exchanges never really went that well.”

[Most of the school dances ended with planes crashing into the gymnasium roof – just kidding.]

“So I didn’t have the normal experiences with dating that most teenage girls would have had,” she adds.

“This is setting the table for you becoming a stripper?” she’s asked.

“Yeah, I think my parents really sheltered me way too much and it backfired,” she laughs.

“I had so much curiosity about everything because I was prevented from seeing or experiencing.”

“Did you ever entertain the idea of maybe having a REAL career?”

“That was my problem in college,” she states.

“I didn’t have any clear direction. I had a vague notion that I might want to become a lawyer but obviously that never happened. There was nothing that really grabbed me at the time. I just wanted to have a lot of experiences. Then someone introduced the possibility of dancing to me. I was really intrigued by that.”

Danielle moved to Los Angeles to go to college. She was working in a restaurant and one of the managers knew someone who was starting a company to provide entertainment for bachelor parties. She tried her hand at it but says it’s something she wouldn’t recommend.

“Some women do fairly well with it,” Danielle states. “I shoot with Mercedes Ashley fairly often and she does a lot of bachelor parties. She runs her own company and loves it. She does great.”

“The bachelor party stories I used to hear about involved guns and kidnappings and cops,” I tell Danielle.

“I did them for maybe six months and I realized they were really unsafe,” she says.

“On the other hand, some people do fairly well, like Mercedes and not just Mercedes. I know other women who do great with them. They’ve got a certain personality for it.”

If you had a nickel for every girl in porn who got her start when someone approached her in a strip club you’d have a lot of nickels. Danielle adds one more in the toll basket.

“I was dancing in Tucson and a photographer approached me wanting to know if I’d do a shoot,” she continues.

“I wound up doing a lot of magazines then I gradually got more and more interested in doing porn. But I was in a relationship and my significant other didn’t really want me to. Finally when we broke up I just did it.”

Her first time in front of the camera doing porn came in Florida. She was working for the Score Group.

“It was with another model who had never done a hardcore scene, either,” Danielle recalls.

“Her name was Nikki Diamond. She was a dancer who had done a number of magazine shoots but I don’t think she did a lot of videos. She was really a great person and someone I wish I had stayed in touch with. We hit it off very well. She’s a very cool person. At the beginning of the scene we were both nervous and didn’t know what we were doing. After that, everything was cool.”

You’re more likely to find Danielle as one half of a girl-girl scene, though she’ll be seen in an occasional b-g scene. Depends on the company. Depends on the circumstances, but she’s more involved now in creating content for her own sites.

The other thing that tickled my fancy is the fact that Danielle has created a nice niche for herself where custom videos are concerned. When I began in the adult business, I wrote about companies which created home industries out of custom work by advertising in video magazines.

“Most of my requests are for fetish material,” Danielle notes. “The most common are for bondage and cat fights.

“So someone sends you a story idea?”

“Exactly,” Danielle says.

“They’ll send a script and I’ll tell them if it’s feasible, if I’m willing to do it and how much it will cost. There’s an amazing amount spent on custom videos. And I’ve discovered that most of my regular customers are actively getting videos from other companies as well.”

“They’re cheating on you.”

“They are,” she laughs. “But they really spend significant amounts of money.”
I
n my research of that industry I found customers who’d literally spend thousands and thousands of dollars to have a custom movie made.

“That’s true,” she says, “and I’m very grateful for them.

With an occasional ad posted maybe on www.clips4sale.com or word of mouth, Danielle has created a pretty good sideline for herself in porn’s recession.

“And I have a certain number of regulars who are keeping me pretty busy. One of the reasons I get so many of them is I try to get the customer to cover the expense of the videos so maybe I’m charging less than some of the other models are. My goal is to monetize the footage. The customers are like collectors. They get fixated on certain models and certain things. If they like a certain model they’ll buy every thing that she’s done.”

“An owner of one of those companies was telling me how he used to get requests all the time for girls smoking cigarettes or ironing clothes,” I tell her.

“I can believe that,” she laughs, noting that there are some “distasteful” places she just won’t go when it comes to subject matter. I remember one girl telling me a “distasteful” place involved herself and a live chicken.

“Not that I would judge what other people are into,” Danielle continues with a yeeech in her voice, “but I was asked to do a video where I was supposed to be on my period. They told me you can fake it with salsa then he had a whole script around it. I said I can’t do this.”

“That’s disturbing,” I tell her. “Somehow I’d want my custom girl to be pristine.”

“Me too,” she says. “If that’s what people are into, that’s cool, but I don’t want to do that.”

One of Danielle’s frequent requests is for sex fight videos.

“There’ll be two women, for instance,” she explains.

“And each one is trying to make the other cum first. Quite often it’ll evolve from a cat fight to a sex fight. There’ll be a certain moment in the video where one challenges the other, ‘I bet I can make you cum before you can make me cum.’ Then the gauntlet’s been thrown down.”

“These things get pretty involved because then you need a co-star,” I mention to her. “You have to cover their expenses. Gets pretty elaborate.”

“That’s why this is so nice,” she replies.

“It gives me the opportunity basically to hire a bunch of models. Most of these videos are usually two-girl. I do some solo stuff but not as much any more.”

Another benefit of shooting custom videos as Danielle’s learned is that you have the convenience of working out of your house.

“Occasionally I travel but very rarely any more,” she says.

“If I dance, I do it locally in LA, but it’s been a while now. I don’t plan to do any feature dancing. Then, again, I’ve heard from other girls that the whole feature dance-thing has died.

“For now I’m going to continue down the same path and am really grateful for my customers,” she adds.

“I’ve seen some pretty hot pictures of you wearing glasses,” I tell her.

“Do you ever get requests to do secretary or teacher-type stuff?”

“All the time,” she says. “It’s one of the most popular outfit requests for sure.”

“Were you ever a secretary, ever?”

“No, I never had a job,” Danielle laughs.

“So you’ve been living off your looks and your body all these years. You’re definitely my kind of girl.”

“Thank God for the Internet,” she laughs.