It gets deeper
A reader can open the photograph instead of scrolling past it — who that is, what they are wearing, what the badge on the shirt means. The story keeps going inside the image.
EditorialIt is still carrying a sponsor's logo, a recognisable athlete, a jersey someone would buy. Each of those is worth something to somebody. SPAT finds them, you approve them, and you decide who gets paid.
A licence is just permission to use something. Today you sell one — permission to print the picture. Everything else inside the frame belongs to someone, and has never been recognized.
This is the photograph on its own. Here it is doing the same thing inside a published story.
See it in an articleA reader can open the photograph instead of scrolling past it — who that is, what they are wearing, what the badge on the shirt means. The story keeps going inside the image.
EditorialThe jersey in the frame is a jersey somebody wants. A reader who has just watched the moment is far closer to buying than anyone who has been shown an advert.
CommerceWhich brands appear, how often, how large, and what readers actually reach for. It is not a snapshot: every reader who opens a photograph adds to it, so the record sharpens for as long as the image stays live. Your archive stops being storage and becomes a position you can sell from and price against.
DataA photograph has more than one owner in it, so the money has more than one destination. This is royalty distribution for still images — the machinery music and film have had for fifty years, and photography never got. Set the shares once and every sale divides itself: no invoices between parties, no reconciliation afterwards. Start from a preset below, or change anything and watch it move.
SPAT takes three per cent of what a photograph earns, and nothing at all if it earns nothing. The remaining ninety-seven is yours to divide.
Send a batch of photographs you own. Every one is read, you approve what is right, and what comes back is a document you can put in front of your stakeholders.
Reading the photograph above.
| Brand | Where it appears |
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A season, a tournament, one big game. You will know by the end of the afternoon which brands have been travelling with your photographs, and what that has been worth to them.
Who somebody is comes from the caption, the shirt number and the team sheet. There is no face matching here.
Everything found arrives as a suggestion. It becomes a right only when someone at your organisation accepts it, and that decision is stored with their name.
A person in a frame is a right to be cleared, not a right to be sold. Their agreement, or their union's, comes first.