Ask a marketer in Japan about their company’s owned media and they will probably name a website: a column section on the corporate domain, or a separate content site with its own name, full of how-to guides and product comparisons written to be found in search. In Japanese, オウンドメディア (ōndo media) has become a noun for that kind of site, and running one is a standard part of digital marketing there.
We wanted to know how much of Japanese search these sites take up. We went back to the 21 Google Japan product searches from our October 9, 2026 test and sorted all 201 top-ten results by who published them. Articles on companies’ own sites accounted for 97, about half. Publishers, comparison sites and review platforms accounted for 47. This article explains what the term means in Japan, what we found, and what it means for a foreign brand, both for publishing its own Japanese articles and for appearing in other companies’.
The short answer
In Japan, owned media usually means a content site or section that a company runs itself, not the full set of channels it controls. These sites rank. In our test, 97 of 201 top-ten results (48%) were articles on companies’ own sites, against 47 (23%) from publishers and comparison sites. Company articles outnumbered publishers and comparison sites in 17 of the 21 searches and took 9 of the 21 first places.
Two findings matter most for a foreign brand. First, 41 of those 97 articles came from companies that do not sell the product in question: web agencies comparing hosting services, schools explaining video editing, a tax office ranking accounting software. That is a fifth of all the results we counted. Second, five companies headquartered outside Japan, Wise, NordVPN, Wix, Praktika and Adobe, reached the top ten with Japanese articles on their own domains. A brand entering Japan can do the same, and it can also earn or pay for a place in other companies’ articles.
What owned media means in Japan
The term comes from the split between paid, owned and earned media that Forrester’s Sean Corcoran defined in a December 2009 blog post, at a time when the terms were already circulating among marketers. In that model, owned media is every channel a brand controls: its website, app, email list and social accounts. Japan adopted the framework as トリプルメディア (toripuru media, “triple media”), the word in the title of Ryuji Yokoyama’s 2010 book トリプルメディアマーケティング (Triple Media Marketing). In everyday Japanese, though, オウンドメディア took on a narrower meaning. When Japanese marketers say オウンドメディア, they usually mean a content site, and オウンドメディアを立ち上げる, “launching owned media,” means starting one.
Search demand shows the difference. In the US, owned media is the least searched of the three terms. In Japan, it is searched far more than the other two combined.
| Term | Japan (searched in Japanese) | US (searched in English) |
|---|---|---|
| Owned media (オウンドメディア) | 8,100 | 720 |
| Paid media (ペイドメディア) | 480 | 1,600 |
| Earned media (アーンドメディア) | 10 | 3,600 |
| Triple media (トリプルメディア) / paid owned earned media | 390 | 390 |
In our reading, the Japanese numbers reflect what owned media became there: a kind of project with its own budget and its own outsourcing market, rather than one corner of a framework. Searches for オウンドメディア 運用代行, owned media management outsourcing, average 260 a month on their own.
A Japanese owned media site usually sits in a directory on the corporate domain or on a separate domain with its own brand name; some companies use note.com instead of building a site. Among the 97 company articles in our test, 26 had “column” in the URL path, 18 had “blog” and 11 had “media” or “magazine”. Japanese sites often call these articles コラム (koramu, column).
What we found in 201 Google Japan results
The searches come from our earlier test of how social platforms appear in Japanese product searches, described in our article on Japanese social media apps. We chose ten product categories a foreign company could plausibly sell in Japan and fixed three queries for each in advance: a recommendation search (おすすめ, osusume), a review search (評判 or 口コミ, hyōban or kuchikomi) and a how-to search (やり方, yarikata). Twenty-one of the 30 ran before the tool credit on our account ran out. On November 4, 2026, we sorted the 201 results by who published each page, checking the site’s home page when the operator was not obvious.
| Who published the result | Results | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The seller’s own article (a column or blog on the site of a company that sells in that category) | 56 | 28% |
| Another company’s own article (the same, from a company that does not sell in that category) | 41 | 20% |
| Publishers, comparison and review sites, independent blogs | 47 | 23% |
| Social, video and Q&A platforms | 28 | 14% |
| Product pages, help pages, store listings, app stores, public bodies | 29 | 14% |
| Total | 201 | 100% |
Company articles were not limited to how-to searches, where you might expect them. They made up 45% of the results for recommendation searches, 42% for review searches and 57% for how-to searches. Publishers and comparison sites were strongest in recommendation searches (25 of 80 results) and weakest in how-to searches (6 of 69). Of the 62 results in the top three positions, 34 were company articles.
The pattern varied by search. Publishers and comparison sites led in four: VPN recommendations, coffee maker reviews and the two sunscreen searches. In seven others, they had one result or none while company articles had four to seven, and five of those seven were how-to searches, among them eSIM setup, WordPress migration and video editing.
This is one day of results for 21 queries in consumer and small-business categories. Enterprise software looks different: on Japanese B2B software searches, comparison sites usually rank above vendors, as we found when we looked at Japanese SaaS comparison media. The classification is our own judgment, and we have described the method so it can be repeated.
Japanese companies write about categories they do not sell
The result we did not expect was how many company articles came from outside the category: 41 of the 97.
In the search for rental server recommendations (レンタルサーバー おすすめ), six of the ten results were company articles, and none came from a hosting company. All six were from web production and development firms. In the how-to search for video editing, six of the seven company articles came from businesses that do not sell editing software: three schools, a PC maker, a manga café chain and an SEO firm. The seventh was Adobe’s. In the search for accounting software recommendations, a back-office outsourcing firm and a tax office published their own rankings of the products.
We read this as a business model rather than a coincidence. A web agency writes the hosting comparison because its readers are about to build a website, and a school writes the editing guide because its readers might enroll. In our experience, many Japanese companies plan owned media around what their prospective customers search for before they need the company itself. For a foreign brand selling hosting, editing software or accounting software, those articles are where Japanese buyers first meet the category, and whether you appear in them depends partly on whether their writers can explain your product in Japanese.
Five foreign companies already rank with Japanese articles
Five of the 97 company articles came from companies headquartered outside Japan. Each was written in Japanese and published on the company’s own domain.
| Company | Search | Position | Where the article sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe | 動画編集 やり方 (how to edit video) | 4 | Japanese directory on the main domain |
| Wise | 海外eSIM おすすめ (travel eSIM recommendations) | 7 | Japanese blog directory on the main domain |
| NordVPN | VPN 設定 やり方 (how to set up a VPN) | 7 | Japanese blog directory on the main domain |
| Wix | レンタルサーバー 評判 (rental server reviews) | 7 | Blog on a Japanese subdomain |
| Praktika | 英会話アプリ 評判 (English conversation app reviews) | 10 | Japanese blog directory on the main domain |
Wise is the clearest case of writing next door. It does not sell eSIMs, but people buying an eSIM for a trip abroad are likely to need money abroad too. Four of the five use a subdirectory on the main domain, the structure we suggest for most foreign companies in our guide to domain structure for Japan. We do not know who wrote these articles or how they were produced. What they show is that a foreign brand’s Japanese article can rank alongside Japanese companies’ owned media.
What running owned media in Japan takes
If you plan to start Japanese owned media of your own, four things usually decide whether it works.
The first is language. The articles need to be written in Japanese for Japanese searches, not translated from your English blog. Japanese buyers search with different words and expect a different level of detail, and our test of machine-translated keywords shows how far a translation can drift from what people actually type.
The second is showing who is behind the site. Japanese corporate sites usually carry a company profile page (会社概要, kaisha gaiyō) with the address, representative and founding date, and in our experience readers look for it before they trust advice from a company they do not know. Our article on the Japanese company profile page covers what goes on it. The same details help AI systems connect your articles to your company.
The third is care with health, money and law. Japanese owned media has a history here. In late 2016, DeNA took down every article on WELQ, its health information site, amid criticism that its medical articles were poorly sourced, and then did the same on its other curation sites, ten in all. A year later, in December 2017, Google announced an update to Japanese search results that it said affected about 60% of health-related searches. Japanese owned media on health, finance or legal topics now commonly names a qualified supervisor on each article, as we explain in our piece on YMYL supervision in Japan.
The fourth is time. In our experience, articles on a new Japanese site take months to collect search traffic, so we suggest budgeting for at least a year of steady publishing before judging the results. For scale, Amanaut, which publishes Nihongo Search, produces over 3,000 Japanese articles a year (2026 run rate).
Getting into other companies’ owned media
The other route is to be included in the articles other companies write. There are two ways in, and it helps to keep them separate.
Earned inclusion depends on what a Japanese writer can find and check. A comparison writer needs a Japanese product page, prices in yen, Japanese screenshots and a way to ask questions in Japanese. Without them, the easiest choice is to leave your product out. Pitching helps less than you might hope: Japanese sites usually take pitches through Japanese contact forms and, in our experience, decline most of them, as we describe in what 160 partnership requests taught us.
The same comparison articles feed AI answers. When we asked AI assistants for product recommendations in Japanese, the products they named seemed to come largely from Japanese listicles, which we cover in how to get recommended by ChatGPT in Japanese. A product missing from Japanese comparisons is likely to be missing from Japanese AI answers as well.
Paid inclusion means a sponsored article, and it has to be labeled. Since October 1, 2023, Japan’s stealth marketing rule has treated undisclosed advertising as a misleading representation, and the advertiser, not the site, is the regulated party; our guide to advertising in Japan explains what it asks of you. Prices vary widely. Among Japanese outlets that publish their rates, the median entry price for a sponsored article is JPY 1.5 million, according to our survey of Japanese media and sponsored article prices.
Smaller sites can cost far less. The Japanese sites we run, including Book Crunch, publish a sponsored feature for JPY 40,000 per article excluding tax, paid once and labeled PR. If you have no Japanese copy, our editors can write the article from your materials for a separate quote.
Common questions
Short answers to three common questions about Japanese owned media.
Is owned media the same as a corporate blog?
Close, but not quite. A corporate blog often carries company news. Japanese owned media usually aims at searches from people who are not yet customers, so it reads more like a magazine or a guide, and some sites run under their own brand name rather than the company’s.
Should we translate our English blog for Japanese owned media?
We would not start there. Start from the questions Japanese buyers search before they need your product, and write those articles in Japanese. Your English articles can still serve as source material for the writer.
Do Japanese owned media sites accept guest posts?
Some accept contributed or sponsored articles, usually labeled PR. In our experience, many take no outside writing at all, because the site exists to support the company’s own business. Ask in Japanese, and expect a sponsored article to be treated as advertising under the stealth marketing rule.
Sources
Our own data, followed by the sources for each fact in the order they appear.
- Nihongo Search, product search test: 21 Google Japan queries fixed in advance (30 planned), top ten results read with Rakko Keyword’s headline tool, October 9, 2026; 201 results classified by publisher type on November 4, 2026
- Rakko Keyword, estimated monthly Google searches for the terms in the first table, 12-month average (checked November 4, 2026)
- Sean Corcoran, Forrester, Defining Earned, Owned, And Paid Media (December 16, 2009; archived copy)
- Impress, トリプルメディアマーケティング by 横山隆治 (Ryuji Yokoyama), June 2010 (Japanese)
- DeNA, CEO statement on the curation platform (Japanese, December 1, 2016; WELQ articles made private on November 29)
- DeNA, Third-party committee and all curation platform articles made private (Japanese, December 5, 2016)
- DeNA, Receipt of the third-party committee report (Japanese, March 2017)
- Google Search Central Blog, 医療や健康に関連する検索結果の改善について (Japanese, December 6, 2017)
- Adobe, 動画編集とは？動画作成の基本を総ざらい (Japanese; position 4 on October 9, 2026)
- Wise, 海外旅行におすすめのeSIM10選 (Japanese; position 7 on October 9, 2026)
- NordVPN, iPhone用VPNとは？設定方法を解説 (Japanese; position 7 on October 9, 2026)
- Wix, 失敗しないレンタルサーバーの選び方とおすすめ8選 (Japanese; position 7 on October 9, 2026)
- Praktika, AI英会話は効果ある？実際にPraktikaを使った感想 (Japanese; position 10 on October 9, 2026)
- Consumer Affairs Agency, Stealth marketing regulation (Japanese; in force October 1, 2023)
Last reviewed: November 2026.
