That’s why this fine Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, available for as little as $9.78, became one of the online retailer’s most popular items in the last week. Prompted by a link at the IAC (IACI)-owned site, CollegeHumor readers bought up scads of the shirts, and filled Amazon (AMZN) with glowing reviews like these:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather…

This is the only t-shirt Chuck Norris wears. Wolves howl at the moon, and the moon howls at Chuck…

…So I’m looking for threads that say, “Hey baby…I’m real boss!” when I stumble upon this epic creation. The wolves spoke to me in a language all their own; it was like German, Mongol, and Bitchin all mixed together. I mean, one wolf howlin at the moon is major…but three???

Why bother? If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to get the joke. More info via the Washington Post, including the most pertinent detail: As clever as the CollegeHumor dudes are, they neglected to actually figure out how to profit from the stunt themselves.

One way to fix that: Turn the entire homepage into a giant ad. Like this one for Fox’s newest iteration of “Night At The Museum” (click to enlarge):

Web sites like News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace have been turning their homepages into giant ads for quite some time, and in some cases it’s been very effective. But as far as I know, this is the first time a search engine has tried it. I’ve got a query (get it?) into the Ask folks and will report back when I hear from them.

UPDATE: Ask spokesguy Nicholas Graham tells me that this isn’t the first time the search engine has offered up its homepage for takeovers. Ask has done it a couple times for charitable causes and it did the same thing last November for “Quantum of Solace,” the most recent James Bond flick. In the case of both that movie and the new “Night at the Museum,” Ask doesn’t get paid for the ad–instead, it gets an in-kind payment via mentions in the films.

Here’s a screenshot of the last takeover Ask did, in April, for Autism Speaks. In that case, the takeover ads also featured hot spots (the boxed question marks) that turned into questions when users moused over them (click to enlarge).

And a good reminder that even though Google’s (GOOG) YouTube generates more than five billion streams a month and Hulu has grown 490 percent in the last year, no one has really figured out a good way to turn all those eyeballs into dollars. Yet.

A short cheat sheet: The guys on the left side of the table are College Humor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, who sold their company to IAC (IACI) in 2006, yet remain employed by Barry Diller. They’re also pretty sharp business guys, it turns out. The guys on the right side are Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, College Humor employees who have had a long-running series of clips on the site. Dina Kaplan, who gets name-checked several times, is COO of New York-based video site Blip.tv, which happens to be the distributor of this clip.

Most obvious example: CNN’s decision to cede much of its airtime to a stunt involving Larry King and Ashton Kutcher, who are having some kind of follower contest, which you can read about somewhere else.

But no need to single out the Time Warner (TWX) unit–every big news outlet now features stories about Twitter, presented by anchors/reporters who use Twitter. Which makes sense, because while Twitter may not be for everyone, it definitely appeals to professional self-promoters. [UPDATE: Add Oprah Winfrey to the ranks.]

If you tried to put a price tag on that kind of coverage… well, it’d be very expensive. Just advertising a Web service on TV doesn’t ensure success–ask IAC’s (IACI) Ask.com (or Pets.com, for that matter). But it can certainly get people to sample the service. So that’s some of what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the press embrace Twitter in real-time, there’s now a service that will let you do just that. Meet Muck Rack, which does nothing but aggregate Tweets from media members (um, like me).

The site comes to us from Sawhorse Media, a Brooklyn company that is trying to make a business out of Twitter-related sites and stunts–they’re the dudes who brought us the Shorty Awards earlier this year, as well as Musebin, a collection of Twitter-sized music reviews.

Sawhorse CEO Greg Galant tells me this one took a week to build, which is good, because the conceit is wafer-thin.

But it’s also a pretty good one–like the late, lamented “March Tweetness” promotion, there’s definitely something to sorting and curating the flood of Tweets. I also like the fact that Muck Rack offers a “links” view  that highlights the full headline of stories that media folks inevitably promote via their Tweets. Very helpful. You could definitely extract a few ad dollars out of this one, if you were so inclined.

Or you could just use it as an excuse to write about Twitter, again.

Fresh off the heels of two search industry conventions (ugh), Mahaney synthesizes a couple different industry reports with his own interviews. Key takeaway: Search advertising spending will be flat at best in the first quarter of 2009, but will rebound for the rest of the year:

As one very experienced Search agency executive put it to us, ‘Flat is the new Up.’ Not surprisingly, specific verticals that were singled out as weak were Retail & Travel. And surprisingly, one vertical that was singled out as stabilizing was Financials. We also picked up signs that February Search spend may be picking back up from depressed January levels. Two leading Search marketing firms separately told us that while January saw client spend cutbacks, indications are firming for a January and March recovery.”

Translation for Google: Mahaney thinks net revenue will decline seven percent for the search leader in this quarter compared to net revenue three months earlier. That will be mind-blowing for the go-go growth company but in line with the seven percent and 10 percent decreases that Yahoo (YHOO) and IAC’s (IACI) Ask have suggested. But Mahaney, a Google bull, thinks the company will end the year up four percent.

Perhaps that should be our definition of a recession going forward–a year when Google (GOOG) posts low single-digit growth–and that’s seen as a good thing.

Ticketmaster (TKTM) and Live Nation (LYV) formally rolled out their merger agreement today, which calls for Live Nation to buy out Ticketmaster shareholders for $575 million in stock. But the financials here are less important than the public relations: To get this deal done, the two companies are going to have to convince regulators that they come in peace and mean no harm–no matter how loudly their constituents disagree.

So far, we’ve only heard the carping about the deal, but it’s been loud, and prominent: Bruce Springsteen has weighed in. So has the New York Times. And now Congress is getting warmed up, too.

Today, argues Ticketmaster chairman Barry Diller, the companies get to start making their case, which they couldn’t do until the deal was formally announced. Now “we are going to really explain and explain and explain and make all of this clear to all our constituencies.”

Diller gave a preview of his talking points during this morning’s conference call:

Argument 1: Don’t blame us for high ticket prices–blame Madonna, or U2, or Phish.

“Ticketmaster does not set prices,” Diller said. “Live Nation does not set ticket prices. Artists set ticket prices.”

That’s true. And then Ticketmaster and Live Nation add supplementary charges, which can jack up the price by 30 percent or more. That’s standard operating procedure for all sorts of transactions–check the invoice for your last plane ticket or give your hotel bill a once-over–but it doesn’t seem to inspire the same rage as it does in concert ticket buyers.

The other problem with this argument: Live Nation is run by Irving Azoff, who is one of the sharpest dealmakers in the music business and who also runs one of the biggest management companies in the business. And since managers are now the most powerful players in the business, they’ve got a great deal to say about how their clients price concert tickets. See the problem here?

Argument 2: Don’t blame us if you can’t get tickets for that Hannah Montana show your kids are demanding. But if you do want a ticket for a sold-out show, we can help you–at a price.

This is what Bruce Springsteen was complaining about. In addition to its core business, Ticketmaster also runs “TicketsNow,” a “secondary marketplace” for tickets. The other word for that is scalping, which is now a legal and booming business on the Web.

But when a concert ticket company also sells “aftermarket” tickets, it makes people feel queasy in a way that they don’t about eBay’s (EBAY) Stubhub, which only does resale.

That feeling is exacerbated when people suspect that Ticketmaster is directing buyers away from its regular tickets and toward its marked-up TicketsNow inventory, which is what happened to Springsteen ticket buyers this month.

Diller says the Springsteen incident was a “technological glitch.” Which may well be true. But you’re going to hear about that one a lot in the coming months.

Argument 3: Whaddaya gonna do? We sell tickets. People are never going to send us thank you cards.

Diller: “This is such a sexy issue. Ticketmaster is never perceived to be on the side of the angels.”

Remember when Pearl Jam testified against Ticketmaster in Congress in the ’90s, convinced the Department of Justice to investigate the company and led a boycott against any venue that did business with them? Those were the days.

Except that Pearl Jam ended up playing small venues, the DOJ (that’s the Clinton-era DOJ, mind you) gave Ticketmaster a pass, and by the end of the decade Eddie Vedder and crew were working with Ticketmaster again.

So maybe this one goes through, too. I’ve heard from plenty of folks who hate the proposed merger (”These two companies SHOULD NEVER be allowed to merge and reproduce,” a former Live Nation employee tells me via email), but I’d love to hear someone who knows both the music business and antitrust law make a cogent defense: You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com and I’ll give you an open forum.

Until then, here’s the slideshow Live Nation is using to explain the deal:

live nation dek – Get more Business Documents

[Eddie Vedder image credit: sick of goodbyes]