Catch+Release’s 87% success rate when it comes to content licensing, compared to the typical 35% brands achieve on their own, is one of the reasons why it has become the official licensing partner for TikTok, attracting major clients such as Meta, Dove, Gatorade, and Teleflora after its founding in 2015. Since then, the San Francisco-based company has built a two-sided marketplace where brands can discover and license authentic internet content in minutes. 

The idea for Catch+Release came from Analisa Goodin’s years of working with top advertising agencies, including Goodby Silverstein and Partners and Wieden + Kennedy. 

As both founder and CEO, she witnessed creative teams struggle with two equally frustrating options: using inauthentic stock content or navigating the labyrinthine process of licensing user-generated content.

“When I first started the company, I was doing the work of finding content on the Internet for my clients for many years already,” Analisa recalls. “They were frustrated with the options in stock photography and stock video, which are very inauthentic. It’s quite staged, uninteresting, and cheesy at times.”

Meanwhile, the explosion of content creation across social platforms had the Internet teeming with authentic, compelling material that brands desperately wanted — but couldn’t efficiently license.

“I realized that there’s a major gap in the market,” explains Analisa. “There is no one focusing on making this supply chain available to buyers. Without any scalable way to get permission and pay people and get the legal rights to their stuff, it was like a bottleneck — it was like the floodgates were closed.”

While Getty Images, Shutterstock, and similar platforms built libraries from the supply side by first acquiring content from creators and then offering it to brands, Catch+Release inverted this approach.

“We took the demand route,” Analisa says. “We need to understand what clients are looking for, what is fueling their stories.”

The Technology Behind the Solution

Catch+Release’s success rate stems from technology that streamlines the licensing processes Analisa previously performed manually “thousands and thousands of times.”

“We’ve built a very quickly growing creator community that allows brands to just come to Catch+Release and search from a pool of licensed material from creators who already know the process and who are already experiencing some success,” Analisa explains.

For brands that discover content outside the platform, Catch+Release offers a validation and licensing service: “We assess the license stability of it. We assess who the creator is, what all of the different pieces of intellectual property are, and we take care of the entire license transaction.”

This technical infrastructure enables transactions that previously took weeks to complete in just minutes. “We want to emulate the stock licensing experience with Internet content,” says Analisa. “That’s the goal. You come to Catch+Release, you see something on the Internet, and you buy it within a few minutes. You don’t have to wait weeks or days.”

The Two-Sided Marketplace

As Catch+Release has grown, it’s developed into a two-sided marketplace serving both brands and creators in unique ways.

For brands, the platform offers two primary paths to content acquisition. First, they can bring content they’ve discovered elsewhere: “Brands can bring content to us that they found on the Internet that they want to use, and their teams bring it to Catch+Release,” Analisa explains.

Alternatively, brands can search directly within the platform: “Brands can come to Catch+Release and search for images and videos added by creators who’ve joined our community and want to license their content.”

The creator side of the marketplace is growing at a rate of “400% quarter-over-quarter,” according to Analisa. Unlike most creator platforms, Catch+Release doesn’t ask creators to produce new content specifically for licensing. Instead, it monetizes content they’ve already created.

“The whole point here is not to ask creators to do more,” Analisa emphasizes. “Creators are doing all the right things already. They’re doing enough. They’re capturing content that resonates with their personal experiences. They have a unique point of view. They’re shooting with high-quality equipment. They’re distributing their content in a way that we can discover it.”

As Analisa reveals, this approach is attracting creators who never considered licensing as a revenue stream. “We’re not only licensing content from creators who know they’re creators,” she notes. “We’re oftentimes licensing content and paying people who never would have dreamed they would ever make any money selling their stuff.”

The Authentic Content Advantage

Analisa emphasizes that beyond efficiency, the fundamental value proposition of Catch+Release is access to content that feels genuine.

“It’s content that was not scripted,” explains Analisa. “It wasn’t a director going out and shooting with actors. It wasn’t a stock photo or video with actors. These are real moments.”

This authenticity, she notes, fosters a connection with audiences. “The end result for the viewer is that you end up feeling like you were just bathing in real stuff,” Analisa says. “Real stories–not staged. It doesn’t look like advertising. It looks like something much more interesting to watch.”

She draws a parallel to influencer marketing: “If we don’t have to tell you that our product is great, if someone you trust tells you that our product is great, you’re more likely to buy it.”

As Analisa points out, this authenticity can’t be replicated by artificial intelligence: “AI can’t create that stuff,” she asserts. “AI is not there visually. It’s not going to make something that feels that genuine.”

Enterprise-Grade Safety and Scale

For major brands, legal safety is essential. Unauthorized content use can lead to major liability, as Analisa notes: “Plenty of people have sued major brands for not licensing correctly. Billions of dollars in lawsuits.”

Catch+Release addresses this concern through thorough risk management: “We indemnify the transactions so we take on all of the legal risk,” Analisa explains, adding that this protection, combined with the platform’s automation capabilities, makes the service particularly valuable for large clients.

TikTok represents a prime example of this partnership: “We’re the official UGC licensing partner for TikTok,” Analisa shares. “They’re submitting shots from TikTok into our system that are getting cleared in minutes and ready to license in minutes, which is incredible.”

The platform has also developed collaboration tools that enhance workflow between brands, agencies, and production companies. “We make it easy for them to storyboard, script, and share access to the content they’re viewing with their agencies and production companies,” says Analisa.

Creators also maintain control over how their content is used. “A major tobacco company could say, ‘I want to use your photo.’ And you could say, ‘I’m not interested in licensing my stuff for any tobacco or alcohol related products,'” explains Analisa. “That’s completely your prerogative.”

Expanding the Licensing Ecosystem

Analisa sees licensing becoming more integrated into the content creation process itself. Rather than being an afterthought, licensing could be built directly into social platforms and creator tools.

“Catch+Release intends to build tooling for licensing that goes further and further upstream from creators posting to the Internet,” she explains. “We intend to do partnership deals with not just TikTok, but also Meta and Snap, and others to create a licensing process built into those social platforms.”

Analisa also foresees creators downloading licensing apps directly to their devices, so “content straight from their photo library can already be released into the Internet with a certain number of releases or awareness around licensing existing content.”

In the broader creator economy, Analisa predicts a “massive democratization” that extends monetization opportunities to anyone creating content, not just professional influencers or content creators.

“In five years, what we’re going to see is a massive democratization of what we think of as creators and what we think of as an economy for those creators,” she says. “Now it’s not just about people who have the intention of being professional creators, but people who have created anything, which is innately a human act.”

She also anticipates creators taking more control over their data and intellectual property in the AI era: “We’re going to see creators start to take some of the power back from the large language models and AI platforms to be compensated in some sort of model for their work being used as a data set for training.”

By focusing on demand first, Catch+Release has created a way for brands to source authentic content while fairly compensating creators. The company’s mission is clear: “to connect, protect, and celebrate creators and storytellers, empowering them to share their work with confidence and purpose.”