How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW)
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#BreakTheInternet?
On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website (NSFW). It linked together all of these things—and other articles, too—under the “#breaktheinternet” hashtag.
There was one part of the Internet that PAPER didn’t want to break: The part that was serving up millions of copies of Kardashian’s nudes over the web.
Hosting that butt is an impressive feat. You can’t just put Kim Kardashian nudes on the Internet and walk away —that would be like putting up a tent in the middle of a hurricane. Your web server would melt. You need to plan.
#Don’tBreakThisPartPlease
During the first week of November the PAPER people got in touch with the people who run their website, and said:
“We may get a lot of traffic.”
PAPER is an arts, culture, celebrity, and nightlife magazine, very woven into the culture of New York City after 30 years in existence. It has had a website for about 20 of those years. It’s neither a big nor a small magazine — its monthly readership, including its website, is 650,000 people, according to its media kit, and it claims more than 100,000 subscribers.
The person at PAPER who did the getting-in-touch is named Jamie Granoff. She manages their sites, web advertising, and production — as well as coordinating events and providing support on the print magazine.
The company that keeps the papermag.com website running is called 29th St. Publishing. It’s in New York City. (Disclosures: I worked with this company a few years ago and people who work there are my friends. I wrote this article because the subject interests me, and because they did a crazy thing well in a short time. PAPER gave me permission to talk with them about the project and I have no financial interest in their work.)
