The watermark is primarily for the web-developers and web-masters that have not yet paid for a licensed copy of the image and are just marking things up on the page.

If you're smart enough to find the image, download it, embed it in your website, you're smart enough to figure out the rest.

It's not ment to be used on a production/deployed website to drive traffic to getty. It's just a reminder to you.

I dunno. I immediately saw it as a URL, because honestly, what else would it be?

I thought it was a product code.

Any decent product code should be a URL...

It's both.

http://? What's that? My Firefox and Chrome don't show that.

It's a functional programming thing; stands for "Haskell Time To Party". It might sound funny, but it is very, very serious and esoteric.

This week a coworker and I (more than 10 years of admin experience each) spent 15 minutes wondering why one internal web server was not reachable from a specific computer. Turned out that we got so used working with Firefox and Chrome that we forgot IE8 doesn't understand an address like IP:port/ if you don't specify the protocol (http://IP:port/).

As the Zen of Python says, explicit is better than implicit.

As my fingers say, thanks for the reduced keystrokes.

So, as I just learned recently, the <huge number> is their 'Creative ID'. People who use Getty images enough know that they can just track that number and look up images from Getty.

So, in a sense, you're right. It is both a URL and a 'product code'.

Getty Images is all over the web. And while initially it might be like you say, I think it will eventually become some sort of branding that people will learn to use.