Martin Clarke expects to be turning £100 million plus in digital revenue in three to five years. Clarke once also described mailonline as “journalistic crack”. He said it like a man who has watched about two and a half seasons of The Wire, thinking it all seemed like fun and assuming that things will probably turn out quite nicely for the crack dealers.

As anyone who has seen the series can attest, crack-dealing is not the sort of business in which you can really make three to five year forecasts. Neither is banner ad-based journalism.

Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery.

It’s a real risk for the company, since it’s easy to screenshot the new versions if you want to snag an unlicensed version. But according to Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, that ship sailed long ago. “Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply,” he says. “The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening… Our content was everywhere already.”