A leader asks the marketing team a simple question, "where should the next dollar go?", and gets back a tangle: SEO, paid search, an influencer, the newsletter, a PR push, the company blog. They sound like rivals competing for the same budget. They aren't. They're three different kinds of thing, and once you can name the kind, the budget argument gets a lot calmer.

The quick version

  • Owned media is what you control, your website, blog, email list, app. Earned media is coverage others give you for free, press, reviews, word of mouth. Paid media is reach you buy, ads, sponsorships, paid search.
  • The PESO model adds a fourth: shared media (social), sitting between earned and owned.
  • SEO grows the value of owned media in unpaid (organic) search; SEM is the umbrella over search marketing and, in common use, means the paid search ads beside it.
  • The categories aren't watertight, and the model can't tell you what works, but it's a fast way to spot what you're over- and under-investing in.

The idea in depth

The owned / earned / paid split came out of the digital-marketing world around 2009. The version most cited is Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran's report No Media Should Stand Alone, which set out three roles: owned media (channels a brand controls, like its site), earned media (when customers and press become the channel, coverage, shares, reviews you didn't pay for), and paid media (advertising you buy to drive the other two). The title carries the real point: these aren't three competing budgets, they're three roles in one system, and they work by feeding each other.

That's the load-bearing idea, so it's worth slowing down on it. So the move is: before you compare two tactics, label them. A blog post and a Google ad aren't substitutes, one is owned, one is paid, and they do different jobs. Owned is the asset you build and keep; paid is the reach you rent and lose the moment you stop paying; earned is the credibility you can't buy directly but can provoke. Asking "ads or SEO?" is the wrong question. The right one is "what's the job, and which kind of media does it best?"

A few years later, Gini Dietrich, founder of the firm Spin Sucks, argued the three-part model missed where most attention now lived: social platforms. Her PESO model, popularised in her 2014 book Spin Sucks, adds shared media as a fourth category, giving Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. Shared media is the grey zone, your social accounts are owned-ish, but a post only travels when other people share it, which is earned-ish. Dietrich's framing, set out on the Spin Sucks PESO page, treats the four not as silos but as an operating system: the value comes from the overlaps, where a paid post seeds a shared conversation that earns press and drives traffic to an owned page.

flowchart TD
  Paid("Paid · ads, sponsorships, paid search") --> Goal(["Attention & traffic"])
  Shared("Shared · social posts, communities") --> Goal
  Earned("Earned · press, reviews, word of mouth") --> Goal
  Owned("Owned · website, blog, email, app") --> Goal
  Goal --> Asset(["Owned assets that compound over time"])
  Asset --> Owned
The PESO categories feed one channel of attention, and the loop pays back into owned media, the only kind you keep. Leaders Loop

Where SEO and SEM actually fit

Search is where the three categories get usefully concrete, and where the jargon does the most damage. The short version: SEO is owned, SEM (in everyday use) is paid, and they sit side by side on the same results page.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the work of making your owned pages rank in the organic (unpaid) results. Google is blunt about the economics here: in its own guidance for site owners, it states that "Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in organic search results" (Search Central, "Do You Need an SEO?"). So SEO is an investment in an owned asset: slow to build, but it keeps working after you stop spending.

SEM, search engine marketing, is the broader umbrella. As Search Engine Land puts it in its guide to SEO, "imagine SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side", where PPC (pay-per-click) is the paid search ad. In strict terms SEM covers both organic and paid; in common usage, when a marketer says "SEM," they almost always mean the paid ads. That ambiguity trips up a lot of budget conversations, so it pays to ask which one the speaker means.

So picture the results page as one piece of ground with two routes onto it. Paid search (SEM/PPC) buys you the top slot today and stops the day the card declines. SEO earns a slot that compounds but takes months. A mature plan runs both deliberately, paid to test which queries convert now, then SEO to own the winners cheaply over time, rather than treating them as an either/or.

Owned is the asset you build and keep. Paid is the reach you rent and lose the moment you stop paying.

The honest limitation. The categories leak, and anyone selling you the model cleanly is overselling it. Your own social account is "owned" until the algorithm buries it, at which point its reach is really "earned", which is exactly why Dietrich added "shared" rather than forcing it into a box. An affiliate or influencer deal is paid and earned at once. And critically, the model is a taxonomy, not a strategy: sorting channels into four buckets tells you nothing about which to fund, how much, or in what order. It's a map of the terrain, not a route through it. Treat it as a way to surface blind spots, "we have no owned asset worth ranking," "we're renting all our reach", not as a plan that hands you the answer.

A worked example

Take a mid-sized B2B software firm, a composite, and the figures below are illustrative, that has quietly become addicted to paid search. It spends, say, an illustrative £40k a month on Google Ads, gets a steady flow of leads, and panics every time the cost-per-click creeps up. The whole engine is rented. Stop paying, and the traffic vanishes the same afternoon.

Label the channels and the imbalance jumps out. Paid is doing all the work. Owned is a thin website and a neglected blog. Earned is whatever happens by accident. Shared is a LinkedIn account that posts job ads. Plotted on the PESO map, it's a one-legged stool.

The rebalance isn't "stop the ads", that flow is real revenue. It's to make paid earn its keep by building something owned. Use the paid-search data to find the ten queries that actually convert, then commission genuinely useful owned content, guides, comparisons, a tool, targeting those exact queries with SEO. Over an illustrative six to nine months, the best of those pages start ranking organically. Now the firm wins some of that traffic for the cost of the content, not £40k a month, and can redirect paid spend to new, untested queries. The earned and shared legs follow: content good enough to rank is good enough for others to cite and share. Same channels, same model, but read as a system instead of a single addiction.

flowchart LR
  PaidSpend("Paid search · find queries that convert now") --> Insight(["10 high-intent queries"])
  Insight --> Content("Owned · build SEO content for those queries")
  Content --> Rank(["Pages rank organically over months"])
  Rank --> Cheap(["Win the traffic cheaply, free up paid budget"])
  Rank --> Earned("Earned & shared · others cite and share it")
  Cheap --> PaidSpend
Illustrative: paid finds the demand, owned content captures it for the long run, and the loop frees the ad budget to keep exploring. Leaders Loop

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between earned and shared media?

Earned media is coverage other people give you that you don't control or pay for, a journalist writes about you, a customer leaves a review, someone recommends you. Shared media is the social layer: your posts on platforms where reach depends on others engaging. Dietrich split shared out of earned precisely because social is a hybrid, part owned account, part earned reach. If the distinction feels fuzzy, that's the point: she added the category to name the fuzziness, not resolve it.

Is SEO part of owned or earned media?

Mostly owned. SEO improves pages you control so they rank organically, and the ranking page is an owned asset. The grey area is the off-page side, backlinks and mentions from other sites, which you influence but don't own. So the page is owned; some of the signals that make it rank are earned. Both are unpaid, which is what separates them from paid search.

Should a small business with no budget bother with paid at all?

It can skip it, but it shouldn't skip the logic of it. With no money, you lean on owned (a sharp website, an email list you control) and earned (do something worth talking about; ask happy customers for reviews). The risk in going paid-free is patience: owned and earned compound slowly. A tiny paid test is often worth it just to learn which messages and queries convert before you spend months building owned content around them.

Is SEM just a fancy word for Google Ads?

In everyday conversation, usually yes, most people say "SEM" to mean paid search, which on Google means Google Ads. Strictly, SEM is the umbrella that includes both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) search marketing. The mismatch matters in a budget meeting: if someone proposes "increasing SEM spend," check whether they mean buying more ads or investing in ranking, they're very different bets with very different timelines.

Which of the four should we invest in first?

Owned, almost always. Paid and shared drive attention to something, and earned tends to follow from something worth covering, so without a solid owned asset (a site, a product page, content that converts), you're paying to send traffic to a leaky bucket. Build the bucket first, then turn on the taps.

Related in the Toolkit

Sorting channels into owned, earned and paid only pays off once you know who you're trying to reach and what you stand for, which is why this sits next to marketing strategy & STP and brand awareness & positioning. The media model is the distribution layer; those decide the message it carries.

Where to go next