The brilliance of NBC’s HornyManatee.com

The other night on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, there was a skit that featured a guy sitting at a computer watching a manatee (another guy in a costume) touching himself. Then Conan cracks an ad-libbed line that he must be watching HornyManatee.com. That was at 6:30 p.m. in the taping — the show aired later that night — and NBC execs realized that HornyManatee.com was an open domain. What if someone put up a porn site? Or worse? Writes the NY Times, “In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy,” NBC bought the domain. Shortly thereafter, Conan’s staff launched HornyManatee.com, a hilarious spoof on a manatee porn site that encourages users to send in their own “amateur horny manatee pictures or stories” for possible use on the air. (One user sent in a poem with the line, “I want to freak thy blubber rolls.” Conan read it on the air.) By yesterday afternoon, NBC says the site has received 3 million “hits” — which we assume they mean page views — and it’s well on its way to become a viral phenom. Well done. When you think about it, this has to be the fastest launch of a new site by a big media company in history. Sexy screen grab…