What Time Is It Right Now: A Domain That Answers Its Own Question

What Time Is It Right Now is a website that exists to answer the question in its own domain name, and it does not really do that either.

What you get instead is a logo, four city names that fling you off to somebody else’s time zone site, a cartoon detective standing there for no stated reason, and a banner reading COMING SOON. It has been coming soon for years. This is one of the funniest pages on the internet, and understanding why requires a short detour through a cartoon about a depressed horse.

What is What Time Is It Right Now?

In BoJack Horseman, WhatTimeIsItRightNow.com is a streaming service. It was, we are told, a website for people who do not realize the time is displayed in the corner of their computer screen, and it has since pivoted into prestige television. In season five it commissions Philbert, a self-serious detective drama, and the show mines the premise for everything it is worth: a clock website producing an Emmy-hopeful crime series, because in the mid-2010s absolutely everyone was becoming a content platform.

It was a good joke because it was barely an exaggeration. Retailers, phone manufacturers, search engines and social networks all decided within roughly two years that what they really were was studios.

The real domain leans into this. Load it and there is Philbert, in the same illustration style as the show, hanging around a page that has no series to offer you. The four city links go to an ordinary time zone reference site. The COMING SOON banner promises something that has never arrived and, one suspects, never will.

So you have a website named after a fictional website that was itself a joke about websites doing things they should not do. It answers its own domain name only by delegation. It advertises content it does not have. It is a four-layer gag maintained by inertia, and the whole thing loads in under a second.

There is a genre of site that is funny because someone worked hard on it. This is the other genre: funny because almost nobody did.

What can you do on What Time Is It Right Now?

• Ask the titular question. Click a city and you get bounced to a real time zone lookup that answers properly. Mission accomplished, technically.
• Check the four cities. Los Angeles, London, New York City and Hong Kong, which is a defensible spread for a page that gave this about four minutes of thought.
• Look at Philbert. The artwork is the confirmation that this is deliberate rather than an abandoned parked domain.
• Read COMING SOON. Consider how long it has said that. Consider what could possibly be coming.
• Send the URL to a BoJack fan. No message needed. They will get there.
• Use it as an argument. It is a compact demonstration of what happens when a domain name is a better product than the product.

Tips to get the most out of it

Watch the show first, or at least season five. Without Philbert, this is a mediocre time zone page. With it, it is a punchline that somebody paid registrar fees to keep alive.

Do not expect a clock. Every visitor scans the page for a big ticking display. There isn’t one. The absence is the funniest design decision on the site.

Check the Wayback Machine. Watching the various states this domain has passed through over the years is more entertaining than the current version, and takes about two minutes.

Use a real tool if you need a real answer. For actual time zone math across a team or a trip, this is not it, and it does not pretend otherwise for very long.

Appreciate the restraint. Somebody could have built a full clock site here and cashed in on the show’s name. Instead they put up a coming soon banner and walked away. That is almost artistic.

If you like What Time Is It Right Now, also try…

• Is It Friday Yet?: a domain that asks a question and, unlike this one, answers it directly.
• Is It Christmas?: one word, correct 365 days a year, no further features planned.
• Down For Everyone Or Just Me: the single-purpose site that actually earned its permanent bookmark.
• Time and Date: what you want when you genuinely need to know what time it is somewhere.

More domains taken far too literally in Weird & Wonderful, and things that actually keep your schedule straight in Productivity.