Kim Kardashian’s bare backside on the cover of the relatively small-selling Paper magazine in the US has driven nearly 16 million page views and 11.4 million unique visitors on PaperMag.com
The website usually receives about half a million UVs per month.
It was certainly a breakthrough moment for the 30-year-old title, said Adweek. With a circulation of just 155,000, Paper has 70 per cent of its readers in New York and Los Angeles. This week, however, “Paper became a familiar name for pretty much anyone with Internet access,” said Adweek.
“It is definitely the largest moment we’ve ever had, both digitally and from a media perspective,” Drew Elliott, Paper’s chief creative officer, told Adweek. “It’s definitely touched every market across the globe.”
There’s also a seemingly endless number of #BreakTheInternet memes inspired by Kardashian’s bare backside. (For the record, Elliott’s personal favorite is the Homer Simpson version.)
The magazine is also printing an additional 35,000 copies of the new issue to accommodate massive newsstand demand. Quantities of the nude cover, however, will be limited to just 10,000 copies. Retailers and subscribers will only be receiving an alternative fully-dressed champagne cover (pictured), so anyone looking to get their hands on the racier version will have to purchase it on PaperMag.com.
Elliott says , “the butt shot” wasn’t actually part of the original concept. Paper had asked French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, to recreate his 1976 photo of a model resting a champagne glass on her ample derrière with Kardashian as the star. But during the shoot, Kardashian began to do a striptease, and thus the revealing photo spread was born.
“From the get-go, [Kardashian] said, ‘I’m ready to do this,'” said Elliott. “She was very familiar with Jean-Paul and very excited to work with him.”
“We wanted to use this [cover] to help establish ourselves digitally,” said Elliott. “We never could have imagined that it would be this successful.”
Kardashian once said she would never pose nude again but this is her second daring magazine cover in three months. She was photographed for the October issue of British GQ.
