Owned Earned Paid
Content MarketingAlso: PESO Model · Paid Earned Shared Owned
Quick definition
Owned, earned and paid media is a framework for grouping every marketing channel by who controls it. Owned is what you fully control, like your website or email list. Earned is coverage or mentions you didn't pay for, like press or word of mouth. Paid is media you buy directly, like ads.
How it varies across Australia
Australian businesses tend to over-index on paid relative to owned and earned, particularly in categories where auction costs are climbing. Businesses with stronger owned assets typically show more resilience when paid costs spike.
See channel mix benchmarks across Australian industries →The three categories
Channels you fully control: website, email list, app, blog.
Full control, slow to buildCoverage, mentions and reviews you didn't pay for.
High trust, low controlMedia bought directly: search ads, social ads, display.
Fast, but stops when spend stopsWhat it actually means
Think of the three categories as different kinds of property. Owned media is the house you own outright, your website, your email list, your app. Earned media is the reputation your neighbours have of you, built through word of mouth, reviews and press you didn't pay for. Paid media is the billboard you rent for a month. It works while you're paying for it and disappears the moment you stop.
Most marketing plans are built as three separate teams working from three separate briefs. That's the mistake. The three categories should reinforce each other. A strong piece of owned content becomes the thing paid media points to. A well-placed paid campaign generates the social proof that becomes earned media. Earned coverage drives traffic back to owned assets that convert it.
The framework is sometimes called PESO, adding shared media as a fourth category for organic social and user-generated content (UGC). Whether you use three buckets or four, the point is the same. Channels aren't independent. Attribution gets messy quickly when you try to credit a sale to just one bucket, which is exactly why this framework exists as a planning tool rather than a measurement tool.
Paid media rents attention. Owned media builds an asset you keep after the campaign ends.
How it shows up
This shows up most clearly in a channel audit. List every active marketing activity and tag each as owned, earned or paid. Most businesses discover their mix is heavily skewed, usually toward paid, with owned assets under-invested and earned media left entirely to chance rather than actively pursued through PR or partnerships.
It also shows up in resilience during a platform change. When an algorithm update or a rise in cost per click (CPC) hits paid performance, businesses with strong owned and earned foundations feel it less because they're not solely dependent on rented attention.
The Australian context
Australia's smaller media market means earned media opportunities are more finite. Fewer publications, fewer journalists covering any given category, which makes genuine earned coverage more valuable when it lands but harder to manufacture at scale. This pushes many Australian content marketing teams toward building owned channels like email and content hubs as the more controllable long-term investment, rather than chasing earned coverage that may not exist in a thin local media landscape.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
What does PESO stand for?
PESO stands for paid, earned, shared and owned media. It's a four-category version of the owned, earned, paid framework, splitting out shared media (organic social and user-generated content) as its own bucket rather than folding it into owned or earned.
Which category should get the most budget?
There's no universal split. Businesses with long sales cycles or high lifetime value tend to benefit from heavier owned investment. Businesses needing fast volume lean paid. The healthiest mixes use paid to fuel owned growth rather than treating them as competing budgets.
Can a channel belong to more than one category?
Yes. A blog post is owned media. If a journalist links to it, that link becomes earned media. If you then run paid ads driving traffic to it, the same asset is now working across all three categories at once.
Is shared media the same as earned media?
No. Shared media is content on platforms you don't own, like organic social posts, where you still control the message. Earned media is coverage or mentions created by someone else entirely, like a journalist or a customer review, where you have no direct control.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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