by Hans Chen

Stripping for E-business

Five years ago, Danni Ashe lived on Hollywood's edge. Ashe, an exotic dancer and model for pornographic magazines, had grown tired of life as a peripatetic stripper, traveling every day from skin joint to skin joint. So Ashe hung up her g-string and, in a small house by the Pacific Ocean, started the Danni Ashe fan club, living off her name and notable body parts by charging loyal fans for autographed pictures or signed issues of Hustler and Juggs.

Then came the Internet. And Ashe became a millionaire.

In the Internet's infancy, Ashe used the Internet to expand her fan-club business into newsgroups. But in 1995, Ashe opened her own porn web site, wittily called Danni's Hard Drive, which soon spread her notoriety. The site is still thriving: five years after launch, Ashe expects to earn $7 million in revenue from eager site subscribers.

"It used to be that during work hours, during work days, were our peak, peak times," Ashe said. "When I got online, people only had reliable Internet connections at the office."

Though increased fear of sexual harassment lawsuits have led to general disapproval of porn perusal at work, Danni's early success relied on bored employees accessing her X-rated e-gallery from their work computers. Since then, a multitude of Internet businesses have joined Ashe in the quest to reap revenues from the daytime use of computers for personal reasons.

Destination: News, Shopping, Jobs

According to Vault.com's 2000 Survey of Internet Use in the Workplace, news and information sites were the favorite web destinations for web-based loafing. Seventy-two percent of users said they read news online, followed by 45 percent who said they used their work computers to make travel arrangements. Forty percent used their work connections to make purchases. And surprisingly, more than a third, 36 percent, took the risk of looking for new jobs while still hooked up to their current employer's Internet connection.

In the past several years, most daily newspapers have moved online, along with broadcasters like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. At MSNBC's site, traffic triples between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Eastern time, said Steve White, MSNBC.com's chief technology officer. Traffic once again peaks between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern time as East Coast employees wind down their workdays and West Coast workers take their lunch break.

"The work users are very concentrated in time, and are more frequent users, because the access is easier," White said. "Very few people have DSL at home. At work, it's a few keystrokes away, instead of dialing up a modem, and all that crap. The barrier of entry are lower."

Slate, the on-line magazine that covers politics and culture, attracts so much workplace traffic that Slate's editor Michael Kinsley jokingly wrote last month in a Wall Street Journal essay, "We thought of adopting the slogan 'Slate: The Thinking Person's Solitaire,' but rejected it as too honest."

Other sites, because of timing, lend themselves naturally to access during work hours. Employees may need to check stock pages during the day when the markets are open, or order movie tickets online before their date that evening.

Ameritrade enjoys a "considerable" morning jump in overall usage from 9:30 a.m. Eastern, when the market first opens, to 11 a.m. Smaller peaks take place from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., as the markets wind down and during dinner-time hours.

~ Other sites, because of their technological requirements, demand fast connections that have traditionally been restricted to the workplace.

At AtomFilms, for example, users can watch live movie shorts or download animation, but only if they have something zippier than a conventional dial-up connection.

"If you're trying to watch a live-action short film, you'll need a broadband connection," said an AtomFilms spokesperson. "With a 56.6 modem I don't think you'd even be able to do it." ~

And porn sites, known for innovative interactive features, typically demand a fat pipe.

"We have created our own streaming media technology, and there's no question that it's a lot more interesting experience on a cable modem than it is on a 28.8," said Ashe. "Obviously, the faster you can get the data, the more data you can get, and the richer the experience will be."

Pure Goofing Off

Then there are the sites that workers visit just because they're fun.

eBay, the online auction house, says its usage peaks at 7 or 8 p.m., EST. But an eBay spokesman says the site still receives an average of 1000 bids every minute of the day.

"It's important to say that the site is always incredibly busy," said Kevin Purseglove, an eBay spokesman.

And since its launch in January 1999, Ishouldbeworking.com has amassed several hundred links to game and joke sites. By charging these sites a dime or so each time a loafer clicks on a link, the site's creator, 34- year Michael Kelly, earns about $35,000 to $40,000 a year. So far this year, he's been getting 20,000 to 40,000 hits a day.

"It's not really anti-work,"Kelly said about his site. "It's for people that are already goofing off to do it more efficiently, and find the best things to maximize their goofing off time.

For employees who enjoy the occasional dozen games of solitaire, such pursuits sometimes require tactics to avoid detection. More than a quarter, 27.8 percent, said they took steps to keep their bosses in the dark about their non-work Internet use.

"My office has hardwood floors, and I can hear him [my boss] coming a long way away, so I am pretty good at switching to a spreadsheet or whatever when I hear footsteps," wrote one anonymous employee who answered Vault.com's Internet usage survey.

Other workers reported other tactics, which frequently involved a keyboard shortcut to switch between programs. "Alt-tab works well," wrote another anonymous employee of the Windows technique that allows rapid toggling between open browsers. "Also, when I'm reading news articles, I cut and paste them into a new Outlook e-mail so it looks like I'm reading work email. Sneaky, eh?"

Games: The Least of Workday Evils?

But a spokesman at Pogo.com, which features several dozen games, including video poker, crossword puzzles, and solitaire (included for the benefit of workers who have had the card game stripped from their Windows operating systems), urged bosses to take a more understanding stance towards the occasional employee loafer.

Taking a break now and then is not a bad thing, and in fact, breaks are fairly accepted and almost mandatory in the working day, said Garth Chouteau, a Pogo.com spokesman. "In the old days, it was a water cooler break, a coffee break, a smoking break. And now, I think in some degree, I think people are taking breaks on the Web."

Nineteen percent of Pogo.com users play from work, and users play for an average of 60 minutes at a time, according to Media Metrix. 30,000 new members register to play every day.

"There are certainly a lot of other things that people could be doing on the Internet that are less productive, or arguably counterproductive, compared to playing online games," Chouteau said, "whether it's looking for another job, or downloading porn."