SEO | April 18, 2016
Why the Kardashians Didn’t Break the Internet… Despite Trying
The Kardashian family are like marmite: you either love them or hate them. The Liberty office is divided; some of our staff are obsessed with the bootylicious reality stars and their glamorous celebrity lifestyles, the other half can’t stand them, purely for the fact they’re famous for being famous.
One thing we can agree on, is despite the family’s claims, neither a Kardashian nor a Jenner has ever ‘broken the internet’.
Why? Well, you can’t really break the entire internet, silly. But Lord knows they’ve tried. Here are a few examples of the Kardashians’ attempts and failures to #BreakTheInternet:
Extreme Infrastructures for a Tidal Wave of Lipstick Loving Ladies
When the youngest babe in the family, notoriously known for the Kylie Jenner lip challenge (Google image search it – it’s shocking!), announced that she would be releasing her own lipstick line, fans all over the world couldn’t wait to get their hands on the matte glosses.
That proposed a problem for Kylie’s team: Lipkitbykylie.com was a WordPress and WooCommerce site which, although great from a user-experience perspective, would struggle with the mass amount of traffic and likely crash.
To prevent this, Californian company Media Temple stepped in with an auto-scaling architecture, RDS database pair and Amazon Aurora. On Cyber Monday 2015, sales opened at 9am and traffic reached more than 160,000 user sessions in 10 minute, which resulted in a static ‘out of stock’ page being presented after just minutes.
The site’s capabilities would need to be extended for future promotions, but it had survived. To learn more about the Lip Kit by Kylie trial read all about the experience on Media Temple’s blog – click here.
Round One: Internet 1 – Kardashians 0
Naughty Nudes in Paper and That #BreakTheInternet Hashtag
OK, so we all know that levitra for sex sells, but we wouldn’t post full frontal nude shots to the world in order to get a few more retweets. But, hey, that’s just us! It worked for Kim Kardashian.
When Kim got naked for Paper magazine in an attempt to #BreakTheInternet, the social media platforms she loves so much proved pretty resilient. However, millions of people around the world saw her photos and the images resulted in 578,000 Twitter mentions of the shoot within 2 days of its release.
Paper harnessed the power of social media’s biggest stars and created a social following of 127,000,000 users, something that undoubtedly contributed to the billions of social impressions and 6.6million page views of Paper on November 12th 2014. We have to admit, 5 million unique visitors in one day is pretty impressive.
We hope you got the photos @kimkardashian?! @samsmithworld PROMISED he’d send them!! Sam x #chattyman pic.twitter.com/FC8A9CoNvz
— Alan Carr Chatty Man (@chattyman) November 21, 2014
There was such social hype over the Paper cover that even worldwide brands like Nissan jumped on the reality star’s social coattails. Reports state that Nissan saw a 22,000% increase in retweets and a 15,000% rise in favourites during the days following the scandal.
Hate to break it to you, @KimKardashian. #BreakTheInternet (cc: @papermagazine) pic.twitter.com/WOWFy5p6FB
— Nissan (@Nissan) November 12, 2014
Round Two: Internet 2 – Kardashians 0
Kimojis Aren’t as Powerful as Kim Thought
You know you’ve made it when you have your own app and emojis right? Well, Kim K has just that. And then there’s normal us, hoping, wishing, praying for a fingers crossed or sandwich emoji will be added to the usual bunch.
But just because you have your own eponymous emoji add-on, it doesn’t mean you can break the internet. Oh no.
Apple, I’m so sorry I broke your App Store!!!
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) December 21, 2015
Yet again, it was a valiant attempt, but the Kardashians did not break the internet – not even the App Store. Despite downloads reaching 9,000 a millisecond at one point, the Kimoji app did not break the Apple store like many thought.
Although it is possible for the App Store to go down during high traffic periods, the issue more likely experienced in this instance was finding the emojis. In an interview with Tech Insider, Apple explained:
‘The truth is, people were probably having issues finding the Kimoji app on the App Store because it takes time for Apple to properly index new applications for search. So unless you had a direct link to the app in the App Store, you wouldn’t have been able to find it with a simple search. It’s possible Apple prioritized indexing the app to ensure more people could find it by late Monday afternoon, but in no way did Kimoji “break” the App Store for any period of time.’
So she may not have broken the App Store, but Kimoji did hit the top of paid apps chart and stay there for some time.
Round Three: We say it’s a draw!
See, the Kardashians haven’t broken the internet – yet. Though perhaps someone should take it away from Kanye to stop him tweeting.
We’re sure there will be plenty more attempts though in their global domination plans for the next couples of years, so watch this space. We may one day be writing a blog post ‘How the Kardashians Did the Impossible – #BrokeTheInternet’
(main image: Paper Magazine)