Inside Asian Gaming

Dec 2007 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING tainly knows what she wants.” TilaCasino.com is hosted in Alderney, the third largest of the British Channel Islands. Alderney has one of the most stringent li- censing requirements of any online gaming jurisdiction in the world. Tila’s rise Before joining MySpace, Ms Tequila had actually built large followings on other so- cial networking sites, including Friendster, but the sites kept limiting the number of friends she could have because they were not technically equipped to handle the amount of traffic she was able to generate. “So they kept kicking me off,” she says.Then, “MySpace owner Tom Anderson saw I was a hot commodity so he emailed me personally and asked me to join MySpace. “There was nobody there when I joined. So I had an email list of 40,000 people from my modelling website and stuff, so I mass emailed them and told them to join MyS- pace on the friends list because I was angry at Friendster after they maxed me out at 500 friends. If they’d let me keep going, Friend- ster would’ve been MySpace.” She adds: “People think MySpace made me, but I was already in Playboy and doing a lot of modelling before MySpace.” Although Ms Tequila is now a celebrity and doesn’t have time to personally reply to the thousands of “friends”who join her MyS- pace site every day, she points out “there’s always the sense that I’m the girl down the street. So I can connect to a lot of people. A lot of people can relate to me.” Interestingly, she believes people who resent her fame and success can be more ardent followers of her progress than her fans. “Either they really love me or they re- ally hate me. There’s no in between. My number one fans are the haters. Those are the ones who buy my music videos so they can talk shit about them. The haters know everything about me. They know my high school records.They knew about my sister. They’re obsessed, the haters. I say ‘wow you must have done a lot of research.’ You wouldn’t be as successful if you didn’t have people hating on you.Then your fans come and stand up for you.” Sign of the times Ms Tequila is now more popular than ever since the October launch of her own reality TV show,“A Shot At Love With Tila Te- quila”, which has become the second most popular show on MTV. The show has 16 guys and 16 girls compete to win Tila’s heart as our bi- sexual heroine gradually whittles down the field of contestants until she chooses the one for her. The show has proved a big hit with MTV’s 18 to 34 target demographic, rank- ing number 1 in its time slot. The last episode garnered 4.2 million viewers. The show has already created a stir in the mainstream media, with news channels such as CNN debating whether the show is too risqué, under headlines such as“Too Raunchy or Just En- tertainment?” In early December, the “haters”were at it again, accusing Ms Tequila of not really be- ing bisexual. It is perhaps an encouraging sign of the times that a celebrity would take offence at being labelled a “closet straight”. Ms Tequila responded angrily that the claim was absurd. 37