What is the difference between paid, owned and earned media?
Paid media is reach you buy on someone else's channel, owned media is a channel you control, and earned media is attention other people give you of their own accord. The three differ on who pays, who controls the message and whose voice the reader hears.
Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran pinned down the definitions in a December 2009 post, when the terms were already in wide use and meant something different to everyone using them. The table below is that frame, with a last row for how each one shows up on a launch on X.
| Paid media | Owned media | Earned media | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Reach you buy on a channel someone else runs | A channel you run yourself | Attention other people choose to give you |
| Who pays | You pay the platform, publisher or creator | You pay to build and maintain it | Nobody pays the person giving it |
| Who controls the message | You, within the platform's rules | You, completely | Whoever is talking about you |
| How readers weigh it | As the company speaking, discounted accordingly | As the company speaking, discounted accordingly | As an independent view, trusted most |
| Speed | Immediate | Slow to build, then durable | Unpredictable |
| When it stops | When the spend stops | When you stop publishing | When people stop talking |
| Typical examples | Search ads, social ads, sponsored newsletters, paid creator posts | Website, blog, docs, email list, your social accounts | Press, reviews, unprompted posts, AI citations |
| On an X launch | X ads and disclosed creator quote posts in the first hours | The founder's launch post, the company account, the landing page | An Explore news story, press, posts from people nobody paid |
What are examples of paid, owned and earned media?
Paid media examples are search ads, social ads, sponsored newsletter slots, paid creator posts and billboards. Owned media examples are your website, blog, documentation, email list, podcast and your own social accounts. Earned media examples are press coverage, reviews, unprompted social posts, podcast invitations, analyst mentions and citations in AI answers.
For a startup launching a product, the lists usually look like this.
- Paid. X or LinkedIn ads, a sponsored slot in a technical newsletter, a sponsored podcast read, and creators paid to post about the launch with a disclosure.
- Owned. The launch post on the founder's account, the company account, the launch video, the landing page, the docs, the changelog and the email list.
- Earned. A news story in X's Explore tab, a write-up in a trade publication, engineers posting their own tests of the product, a Hacker News thread somebody else started, and the product turning up when people ask an AI model for options.
Your X account belongs in the owned column because you control what goes on it. How many people see each post is decided by X's ranker, which matters a great deal for the section on how far owned media reaches.
What is the PESO model, and what is shared media?
The PESO model splits media into four types: paid, earned, shared and owned. Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks introduced it in 2014, and its addition is shared media, meaning social posts, comments, shares and community discussion, as a category of its own.
Shared media exists because social platforms blurred the original three. A post on your account is owned, a stranger sharing it is earned, and the thread of replies under it sits in between, so PESO names that layer separately.
The model's own authors draw the creator line in two places. The Spin Sucks PESO page lists paid influencer programmes under paid and creator and influencer content under earned. That split is the most useful detail in the framework for anyone launching on X, and the next section settles it.
Is a paid creator post paid media or earned media?
A paid creator post is paid media, because money changed hands and the post carries a disclosure. It reaches readers the way earned media does, because it arrives in a person's own words, in a feed the reader chose to follow, from someone whose reputation rides on the recommendation.
The AI answers we ran on this question all stop at the first half. ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Mode and Claude each file a paid influencer post under paid media, and some add that the conversation it starts can count as earned. The difference shows up when you put the three formats side by side.
| X ad | Paid creator post | Earned post | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who is paid | The platform | The creator | Nobody |
| Who writes it | The brand | The creator, in their own words | The person posting |
| Label | Ad | Paid partnership disclosure | None |
| Where it appears | In feeds, as an ad unit | In the creator's followers' feeds, as a post | In the poster's followers' feeds, as a post |
| Seen by ad-free subscribers | No | Yes | Yes |
| What the reader judges | The brand's claim | The creator's take on the claim | The poster's take on the claim |
Two of the three columns behave alike, and they are the middle one and the right one. The placement is bought, and the reach behaves like earned reach: it is visible to the readers who pay to remove ads, who are often the technical buyers X ads cannot reach, and it is judged on the creator's record.
The disclosure keeps it honest. In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides treat payment as a material connection that has to be disclosed clearly, and we will not run a launch without the label. The label tells the reader money changed hands, and the post is then judged on whether the creator's take holds up.
How do paid, owned and earned media stack on an X launch?
On an X launch the founder's post is owned media, creator quote posts in the first hours are paid media, and everything after that, from an Explore story to press and strangers' posts, is earned. The paid layer exists to get the owned post in front of enough of the right readers, early enough, for the earned layer to start.
The Skyfall AI launch, which Doomers AI ran on 19 October 2026, shows all three inside one day.
| Layer | What it was | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Owned | The SKY-001 launch post from co-founder Sam Pasupalak's account, about 340 followers. A benchmark against GPT-6 Astra, three numbers and a 2:36 film. | 3.5M views on the post, about 2,170 times his typical post, whose median was 1,632 views. |
| Paid | Founders, engineers and creators from the Doomers AI network quoting the post with their own take on the benchmark, disclosed, in the launch window. | Put the post in front of audiences who build things during the first hours, when X decides how far a post travels. |
| Earned | A news story in X's Explore tab 26 minutes after posting, and 2,085 posts naming Skyfall or SKY-001 on launch day, against about 2 a day the week before. | More than 8M views across the post, the thread and the posts about it in 19 hours. The founder's account grew from about 340 followers to 10,374. |
Read the table from the bottom up. Nobody can buy an Explore story or 2,085 posts by strangers. They came because the owned post was worth repeating, and the paid layer put it in front of people likely to repeat it while the post was still being tested.
TypeSafe AI's Jev launch on 15 September 2026 had the same shape at a larger scale. The owned layer was founder Diogo Almeida's account, at about 1,500 followers. The paid layer was 80 to 100 engineers, founders and creators seeded with the announcement.
The earned layer was everyone nobody had contacted: researchers, press and communities around the world. The post reached 40M views and 6,818 quote posts, the company accepted more than 150,000 waitlist signups in 24 hours, and Sequoia's Pat Grady said revenue went from $0 to $100M in the first seven days.
How far does owned media reach on X?
On X, your owned audience sets where a launch starts and says little about where it ends. Across 2,095 AI launches in the Doomers AI directory in 2026, the median launch post drew 26 times as many views as the account had followers, and 87% drew more views than followers.
| Followers when posting | Launches | Median views | Median views per follower | More views than followers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | 907 | 264,000 | 122 | 98% |
| 10,000 to 100,000 | 572 | 760,000 | 27 | 91% |
| 100,000 to 1M | 385 | 1.02M | 4 | 82% |
| 1M and over | 231 | 2.16M | 0.63 | 40% |
The bottom row says the most about owned media. Accounts with a million followers or more drew a median of 0.63 views per follower on their launch post. Ten days before Skyfall, Satya Nadella launched Microsoft's Decision-1 model to 9.7M followers and it drew about 1.7M views, and SKY-001 drew 3.5M from about 340.
A follower count is permission to be shown, and the ranker decides how often that permission gets used. That is the practical reason owned media has a ceiling, on top of the discount readers apply to anything a company says about itself.
Method: every visible launch in the launch directory with both a view count and a follower count, read on 25 October 2026, n = 2,095. Followers are the account's current count except where we hold the count at posting, so the multiples for small accounts are conservative. The directory leans toward launches that travelled, so these figures describe launches that worked.
Which should a startup spend on first?
Build the owned layer first, buy the paid layer for the launch window, and treat earned media as the result you design for. Funded in that order, each layer makes the next one cheaper.
- Owned, before anything else. A launch post a stranger could repeat in one sentence, a demo that shows the whole job, and a page that holds the visitor. Paid reach sent to a weak post shows more people a weak post.
- Paid, in the first hours. X tests a new post on wider audiences over a short window. Paid creator posts, and X ads where they fit, put the post in front of readers while that test is running.
- Earned, as the outcome. Press, Explore stories, analyst mentions and AI citations follow attention that already exists. A PR firm can pitch for it, and PR and distribution are separate products that most launches that work end up using together.
Earned media also converts into owned media. Pasupalak's account grew about 30 times in 19 hours, so his next post starts from an owned audience 30 times the size, and the cycle runs again from a higher base.
How do you measure earned media value?
Earned media value (EMV) prices unpaid exposure at what the same reach would have cost as advertising. The usual formula is EMV = (earned impressions ÷ 1,000) × CPM, so 250,000 earned impressions at a $12 CPM come to $3,000. To price your own launch with sourced CPMs for X ads and paid creators, use our earned media value calculator.
It is easy to compute and easy to inflate, and the measurement industry's own body warns against it. AMEC, the international association for the measurement and evaluation of communication, published the Barcelona Principles 3.0 in July 2020, and one of its seven principles states that advertising value equivalents are not the value of communication.
TypeSafe shows why. Pricing its 40M launch views at an ad CPM would count the paid seeding as earned, and the result would say nothing about the $100M in revenue Grady put on its first week.
Measure the outcome directly. These four numbers carry more information than any EMV figure.
- Views against your normal post. Skyfall's launch post did about 2,170 times the founder's typical post.
- Posts naming you per day. About 2 a day before Skyfall's launch, and 2,085 on the day.
- Follower growth on your own accounts. This is earned media turning into owned media, and it is the part that lasts.
- Signups and pipeline. Most of a launch's effect never touches a tracked link, so read it with the three layers in our launch attribution guide.
Questions people ask
Do you pay for earned media?
Nobody pays the person or outlet that gives it, which is what makes it earned. You pay for what produces it: the product, the launch post, PR time, and often the paid reach that puts the story in front of the people who then talk about it.
Is PR paid, owned or earned media?
Coverage that PR wins is earned media, because the outlet chose to run it. The retainer pays for the pitching. Sponsored articles and pay-for-play placements are paid media, even when they are laid out like editorial.
Is a press release earned media?
A press release is owned content, and sending it over a newswire is paid distribution. The coverage it leads to is earned. TypeSafe announced its $40M round through Business Wire, and Forbes writing about the company was earned media.
Is social media owned, earned or shared media?
Your own posts are owned, ads are paid, and other people's posts about you are earned, or shared in the PESO model. On X one thread can hold all three: your launch post, a paid creator's quote post and replies from strangers.
Is email owned media?
Yes. Your email list and newsletter are owned media and among the most durable kinds, because you hold the list and reach it without a ranker deciding who sees each send.
What are the disadvantages of paid media?
Reach stops when spend stops, readers discount anything labelled as an ad, and on X the subscribers who pay to remove ads never see it. Paid creator posts get around the last two, and the price is message control, since the creator writes the post.
Is earned media value real money?
No. EMV is an estimate of what the same exposure would have cost as advertising, and nobody pays it to you. AMEC's Barcelona Principles say advertising equivalents do not measure the value of communication, so report views, saves, follower growth and signups alongside it.
What does PESO stand for?
Paid, earned, shared and owned media. Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks introduced the PESO model in 2014 as a way to plan all four together.