By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Playing into people’s curiosity and understanding how Internet memes can snowball into feeding frenzies, Paper Magazine and Kim Kardashian set out to ‘Break the Internet’ with a daring photo spread.

Much like a modern Helen of Troy, who only needed her face to launch a thousand ships, Kim Kardashian’s nude spread on pop-culture rag Paper Magazine was designed to set the Internet and social media on fire and choke the Internet by starting a barrage of clicks, frenzied retweets and posts.

The “Break the Internet,” issue was a play that was cleverly designed to drive millions of clicks to Paper’s website, elevate its status beyond its demographic, as well as set the Internet ablaze with Kim Kardashian’s name and her now famous behind.

The question of why would anyone want to break the Internet by clogging it with risqué photos of the self-made celebrity? For Kim Kardashian, who is popular for her family’s reality TV show, is a fashion designer and sells a popular app; popularity is currency.

Having her name light up the Internet, even at the expense of exposing herself in a nude photo spread, keeps the buzz going and the money coming in.

The public just can’t get enough of celebrities who expose ever aspect of their lives in various forms of media and, specially on the Internet, the speed and explosive nature of how news gets around  is unparalleled.

Celebrities who know how to play the game and who understand how they can profit from it are set to make a ton of money.

Kim Kardashian posed nude for her Paper spread and reportedly did it for free, but while the stunt raised many eyebrows and generated substantial buzz it didn’t really break the Internet to the point that Paper had expected.

It did pay off handsomely in terms of social capital for Kim Kardashian and even her husband, rapper Kanye West. Because of her pictorial in Paper magazine, Kardashian  garnered 578,000 mentions on Twitter in just the first two days. The actual print issues of Paper Magazine, which cost USD $10 must have sold a bunch as well.

According to The Street.com, “Kim also bumped her Twitter mentions per day average by a factor of 28, according to Spredfast, which measured Twitter data between 8 p.m. CST on Nov. 11 and 11:30 a.m. CST on Nov. 14. The hashtag “#BreakTheInternet” also netted more than 360,000 mentions on Twitter, and Kim’s Instagram butt shot accrued more than 833,000 likes.” 

That’s the sort of um, exposure, that money can’t buy, specially for celebrities whose power comes from being always in the public eye and being talked about, adored and emulated.

This also brings our attention to a new breed of publicity stunt that is likely going to be copied by other celebrities as well as publications angling for more eyeballs and clicks.

This does pose a number of ethical questions. In the uncensored and open Internet, it is all to easy for anyone to see and come across this nude pictorial. Even if you go out of your way to avoid anything that’s Kardashian related, your Facebook friends are going to post links, your Twitter feed is going to blow up with the images and people’s comments.

As the old adage says, “any publicity is good publicity,” and while there’s an admirable sass to guerilla style approach to how Paper Magazine made this move, it does bring into question many ethical, moral and privacy questions. It will be interesting to see what other stunts of an edgy nature will attempt to break the Internet in the future and how we, as consumers of content, will react.