Catch+Release Licenses User-Generated Content for Brand Advertising

01 /The Concept

Licensing user-generated content for advertising sounds simple until you actually try to do it – at which point it turns into a legal and logistical maze involving rights-holders who are hard to find, licensing terms that vary wildly, and timelines that blow through any production schedule. Catch+Release exists to make that process manageable.

The platform helps brands discover, evaluate, and license video and other UGC for use in their advertising, within predictable budgets and timelines. The workflow is structured in stages. A brand submits a link to content it wants to license. Catch+Release evaluates feasibility within one business day for $25 per asset. If the assessment is positive, they contact the creator, negotiate terms, and return with a formal licensing offer within three to five business days for $250 per asset. Once terms are agreed, Catch+Release manages the contract and handles payment.

For brands that don't want to hunt for content themselves, Catch+Release offers a managed search service. After a free 30-minute discovery call to define the brief, the team returns in one to two business days with a curated list of candidate content. Pricing for this is quoted based on scope.

To organize and collaborate on sourced content, the platform includes a Pinterest-style board system where teams can pin assets, leave comments, and share collections across campaigns.

More recently, Catch+Release launched a creator community – a pool of content makers who have proactively opted in to licensing their work for brand use. Creators can sync their social accounts directly to the platform, so newly published content flows into the searchable database automatically. For brands, this dramatically narrows the gap between finding content and knowing it's actually available: they can send a licensing offer directly without going through the full discovery cycle first.

Catch+Release has been around since 2014, but meaningful investment only started flowing in 2019 – $8.5M then, $14M in 2021, and $8.8M more recently. The pattern suggests brand demand for UGC accelerated in recent years, improving the company's growth trajectory enough to sustain investor interest.

02 /Why It Matters

The case for UGC in advertising isn't aesthetic – it's economic. A shaky phone video posted to TikTok regularly outperforms a polished 30-second spot produced by a professional agency. The reason is trust. Audiences have developed a finely tuned filter for produced content, and what breaks through that filter is authenticity – or at least the appearance of it.

This shift is visible across content types. Readers increasingly trust independent bloggers over traditional publications. Brands have chased the same dynamic by working with influencers, and the logic has only deepened: the highest conversion rates often come from smaller, more focused audiences, not from maximum reach. A creator with 10,000 highly engaged followers can outperform one with a million passive ones.

A [related review](/review/iskrennjaja-reklama-luchshe-prodajot) covered the startup Zipr, which found an interesting angle on this: instead of paying influencers to promote products, it gives them discounts to buy those products, then lets them earn on referrals. Someone who genuinely bought and uses a product can talk about it more convincingly than someone reading from a brief. Catch+Release is chasing a structurally similar insight – real footage from real people carries a credibility signal that produced content can't manufacture.

The scale of raw material available is staggering. YouTube receives 3.7 million new videos per day. TikTok receives 34 million. Most of it is noise, but buried in that volume is footage that's already proven it can capture attention. The pitch Catch+Release is essentially making is that brands don't need to create compelling content – they need to find it. That framing has shifted from counterintuitive to conventional wisdom.

Another startup, MagicBrief ([covered previously](/review/kreativami-nado-zanimatsja-a-ne-nastrojkami)), took an adjacent approach: a Pinterest-style platform where brands save competitor ad videos, break them into frames, and generate derivative scripts using AI. The underlying logic is identical – stop investing in creation from scratch and start mining what already works.

03 /Opportunities

Catch+Release's current model is labor-intensive in ways that AI could address directly. The most obvious gap is content discovery: searching the open web for licensable footage is slow and error-prone. A platform built around AI-powered visual and semantic search – something like what Kive ([covered here](/review/fig-chego-najdjosh)) does for stored visual assets, with automated tagging across hundreds of attributes – could compress the discovery timeline dramatically and surface results that human searchers would miss.

Beyond discovery, AI could handle a meaningful share of the creator outreach and negotiation workflow, which is currently the main cost driver and the main bottleneck for scaling. Automating the initial contact, the standard terms conversation, and the contract generation would reduce the marginal cost per licensed asset to near zero.

The most defensible version of this business is a platform that combines an opt-in creator community (reducing discovery friction), AI-powered search (reducing curation cost), and automated licensing workflows (reducing transaction cost). Catch+Release has two of the three; the third is the obvious next build.

For new entrants, the gap Catch+Release occupies is real and growing – the creator economy generates more licensable content every year, and brand demand for authentic footage will only increase. The specific constraint worth solving first is the opt-in creator pool: without a community of content makers who've pre-cleared licensing, every deal starts at zero. Building that community in a specific vertical or content category, rather than going broad, is the most realistic entry point.