According to Art. 24 para. 2 of the Digital Services Act are Provider of online platforms and online search engines required, for each online platform or online search engine they operate, by February 17, 2023, and at least once every six months thereafter, to publicly disclose the publish average monthly active users. The duty Generally does not apply to small and medium-sized enterprises according to Recommendation 2003/361/EC. According to this, a company counts as an SME if it has no more than 249 employees and generates annual sales of no more than €50 million or has a balance sheet total of no more than €43 million.
As the Commission has received a large number of requests for information on the concrete implementation of the commitment, the Commission has decided to publish, for information purposes, a Q&A (Download) to address the most important points requiring clarification (cf. these Communication).
In particular, it is clarified that the providers of the online platforms and online search engines concerned must do not report unsolicited need to. Nonetheless, in the interest of transparency and to facilitate monitoring of the DSA, the Q&A asks providers to submit by e‑mail to the European Commission the information to be published and the method used to determine the user numbers. The email address is provided in response to question 3.
The information should be published in such a way that it can be easily identified automatically. A publication in a permanently visible link is likely to be suitable, similar to the practice already in place today for the data protection declaration and the imprint.
As “active user” shall be deemed to be any user (whether consumer or commercial user) who makes use of the service, e.g. by listening to content or by offering goods for sale on the platform as a commercial user. The term active user extends beyond registered users. For example, users who view available products but ultimately decide not to purchase them also count as active users. Double counting (e.g., when the user accesses the service via different domain names) should be avoided as much as possible. Conversely, however, the DSA does not impose any obligation to use technologies that avoid double counting, nor does the DSA constitute permission to use such technologies.