Lohan's "macabre" Monroe snaps an Internet hit

By Mike Collett-White

LOS ANGELES, Feb 22 (Reuters Life!) - They may be tasteless in many people's eyes, but Lindsay Lohan's nude photographs recreating a famous series of Marilyn Monroe taken shortly before she died in 1962 have paid off for the publisher.

Lohan posed for Bert Stern, the same photographer who pictured Monroe 46 years ago in what became known as "The Last Sitting", because six weeks later she died of a drugs overdose.

Wildly popular on the Internet, the new images have also proved controversial, with bloggers and columnists arguing they were inappropriate given Lohan's visits to rehab last year and the recent death of Heath Ledger from an accidental overdose.

Stern wanted to do the project with Lohan and approached New York magazine about publishing the photographs. The pictures have been so popular that the magazine's Web site crashed, receiving around 20 million daily page views on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The average daily page view in January was 1.2 million.

"This is record daily traffic for us," said magazine spokeswoman Lauren Starke.

Forbes calculated that based on the magazine's published rate card, the extra traffic generated by the Lohan pictures on Monday and Tuesday would be worth over $500,000, although NYmag.com may have negotiated different rates.

Starke confirmed that Stern earned the normal fee for the pictures, while 21-year-old Lohan was not paid at all.