The controversial photo spread of 15 year old Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) in Vanity Fair has been causing quite a commotion in the media since last weekend. The market share of visits to Vanityfair.com increased over 20x on Monday (April 28, 2008) as critics and fans flocked to the website to see the photos for themselves. The spike for the Annie Leibovitz photos of Miley Cyrus was nearly 2x higher than the traffic for the Lindsay Lohan photos in New York magazine in February.

Searches for ‘miley cyrus’ also surged for the week ending April 26, 2008, jumping 2.6x the volume of the previous week. The increase in searches are also the result of racy photos of Miley that had been leaked earlier in the week in addition to the Vanity Fair photos.

The vast majority of the traffic on Monday was new to the Vanity Fair website, 98% of the visitors had not visited in the past 30 days. Google was the leading driver of traffic to VanityFair.com, followed by Yahoo! OMG & Yahoo! News. The News & Media category was a major referral source on Monday, sending 37% of the traffic stemming from the extensive coverage in all of the major news outlets over the weekend.