What better solution do you have, there's no way to make an image file hold a clickable link. And the URL isn't meant to be an advertisement, it's not meant to "entice" you, it's meant to be an easy option for if you already want to go to the place where you can buy, or get more information about, the image.
"there's no way to make an image file hold a clickable link"
Not true since the days of TIFF. JPEG has application-specific tag and Exif data. PNG files are often abused to contain non-image data (i.e. Adobe Fireworks stores vector data after the end of the image). Even GIF files have a comment field!
So, stick the hyperlinks links inside JPEG tags. Use Exif so others can read them. Or make a Photoshop plugin that will display them and let the user click on them.
You could also stick the tags in using steganography, which is more in line with how a "watermark" should work.
The watermark is designed to be visible. You should know it's there without having to check for it. Additional meta data in exif data could be useful. Maybe they even have it, but since it involves more tools than looking at the image in my browser, I don't know if it's there or not.
None of those ways are widely-enough used, the solution needs to be such that more than just a few people can a.) realise the link is there and b.) work out what it is.
In some circumstances, but within the context of Getty pictures, how often is it going to be easier or quicker to scan a QR code than to type "gty.im" and eight digits?
This is the silliest argument ever. You have to have a watermark, and you can't force it to link somewhere. That doesn't mean you can't make the watermark marginally more useful. I am so tired of people arguing in the comments for the sake of feeling like they had something to say.
Designers use these images in photoshop for clients to decide if and which photos to acquire. The watermark is to prevent clients just wanting to steal the images (happens a lot). I think including a url (making the pricing transparent) and including the artist (making it less anonymous) is pretty smart.
Including the photographer's name is the really smart bit. Before, if you used the watermarked image, you were screwing "Getty Images" (a big corporation, i.e. who cares) out of some money. Now, if you use the watermarked image, you're screwing an individual person whose name is right there in front of you out of some money.
I imagine the intent is if you have a bunch of these saved in a folder or someone took the image and put it somewhere else, you have an easy reference as to where to go to the official source (and get pricing information, etc.). It's link info that works even outside an HTML context.
