[James]

Demand for exclusive Big Brother pictures crashes paparazzi website

Posted: 23 August 2006 By: Oliver Luft

A paparazzi photo agency was forced to close its website after 'absurd' demand by Big Brother fans to view its exclusive snaps.

Photographers from World Entertainment News Network (WENN) gained exclusive access inside the Big Brother end of series party on Monday night.

Yet even before the photos hit the tabloid on Wednesday the agency had been crippled as hundreds of thousands of Big Brother fans visited the site to see the exclusive photos online.

For up to five hours on Tuesday publications around the globe were unable to download the pictures as the site's photo library went offline.

In one 40 minute period it received 273,000 hits and it was still experiencing problems 24 hours later.

Owen Beiny, director of WENN, said: "We had to take the site offline because of the absurd amount of demand to see the big brother pictures we have up.

"Our site is a regular haunt of bloggers looking for Big Brother and other celebrity pictures, news got out down at the party that we had exclusive access and the bloggers instantly knew we had the pictures.

"As word spread all the fan sites started linking to our site to get a look at every Tom, Dick and Harry and all the drunken celebrities.

"There was one forty minute period where we got over 273,000 hits. It was just absurd.

"Every tabloid newspaper is carrying the pictures today, and next week all the magazines will too, but just our online business, from publishers like MSN, has been astronomical compared to what we normally do.

"We do this every day of every week, but everyone in the UK has gone bonkers for these pictures, it has been our busiest week."

http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story1982.shtml

BB wrap party pictures - http://www.thisisbigbrother.com/foru....php?tid=49765

[tropical_sunset]

I love going on WENN for the celeb piccies! I am gonna try looking now for the goss!!

[Chrizzle]

I love WENN aswell
thanks for that James

[Princess]

I can't believe I helped crash a site But those pictures are just so cute! Like we couldn't not crash it!