Just imagine what Miley Cyrus could've done for Vanity Fair's September issue. After all, the racy pics of the 15-year-old shining beacon of the American economy in the June issue have landed Graydon Carter his best-selling issue of the year. A very respectable 435,000 units moved on the newsstand. And she wasn't even on the cover.

With the numbers in hand, we can finally analyze what this issue became: An exercise in publicity.

It's likely Carter and photographer Annie Liebowitz didn't know they were sitting on circulation gold; they just thought they had secured pop culture's biggest rising star for a photo spread in the well. Instead, once the photos hit, they were met with cries of exploitation, which forced the Cyrus camp to claim the girl was taken advantage of, while Carter and Liebowitz stood by their decision.

When it came to media coverage, the story wasn't just relegated to insider media coverage — there was the celebrity factor too, which meant Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood were weighing in, splashing the magazine's cover (of Bobby Kennedy) and the Cyrus pictures in an endless loop of free VF advertising. The magazine racked up countless millions of image exposures — as 915 letters and a 20X traffic spike on the website — and left the confines of anything Conde Nast publicity could control.

And when it comes to the numbers, it was to their benefit.

But not every magazine can capitalize on continuous drum beating about a controversy inside their pages. And that includes a Conde Nast cousin.

Vogue's April issue, featuring a racist depiction of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen, also captivated the chattering classes, but rather than focus on sex aspect like the Cyrus controversy, Vogue had to deal with the no-way-to-spin-it-positive topic of bigotry. That magazine moved just 350,000 copies; it was Vogue's worst-selling April issue since 2001.

Moral of the story? As Dateline has taught us, pre-teen sexual imagery makes for numbers gold. But as Dog the Bounty Hunter showed us, racial controversy will run you aground.