Digital Services Act (DSA)

The Digital Services Act, or DSA, is a European Union regulation that sets rules for online intermediaries and platforms, covering areas such as illegal content, transparency, user protection and advertising. Its obligations scale with the size of the service, with the strictest rules applying to very large online platforms, defined as those with at least 45 million average monthly active users in the EU.

Advertising transparency

For marketers, the most visible part of the DSA is the requirement for very large online platforms to maintain a publicly accessible repository of the ads they show in the EU. Under the regulation, the repository should include, among other things:

• the content of the ad;
• the person on whose behalf it was presented and, if different, who paid for it;
• the period during which it was shown;
• whether it was targeted and the main parameters used;
• the total number of recipients reached, with breakdowns by member state where applicable.

Ads must stay in the repository for the period they are shown and for one year after they were last presented. These obligations began applying to the first designated platforms in 2023.

What it means in practice

The DSA is the reason the Meta Ad Library contains far more detail about commercial ads delivered in the EU than about ads shown elsewhere. Researchers, journalists and advertisers can see inactive ads and estimated reach that were not previously public.

How PixelSpyer helps

Because of this transparency data, EU-delivered ads are especially useful for competitive research. PixelSpyer builds on this public data so you can search and organise it more easily.