The DSA's 2024 ad rules require naming who paid and why

The revenue mechanism

Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act, applied in full from 17 February 2024, the date set in its own text. The regulation targets providers of online platforms, a category including large social networks and marketplaces, and it can include publisher platforms with interactive features such as comments or accounts, depending on how those features function. Its advertising provisions do not restrict ad revenue directly, but add disclosure duties to any ad shown on a covered platform's interface: the platform must let each recipient identify, in real time, that content is an advertisement, on whose behalf it is presented, who paid for it if different, and meaningful information about the targeting parameters used.

What the documents show

Article 26 requires these disclosures for each specific advertisement shown to each individual recipient, and separately bars ads based on profiling that uses the special categories of data GDPR's Article 9 defines, such as health, sexual orientation, or political opinion. Article 28(2) goes further for one population: a platform may not show a minor profiling-based advertising once aware, with reasonable certainty, that the recipient is underage, while Article 28(3) clarifies this does not require collecting extra data just to determine age. The Commission's own Digital Services Act package page frames these duties as part of a broader transparency regime also covering recommender systems and content moderation.

The assumptions exposed

The regulation's ad-transparency duties fall on the platform operator, not automatically on every publisher whose content appears there, so a publisher's own direct-sold ads are not governed by Article 26 the way a platform's ad interface is; the practical effect depends on which distribution channels a publisher uses. The minors provision assumes a platform can judge reasonable certainty about age without new data collection, leaving open what signal counts as sufficient, since the text enumerates no method. It is also worth distinguishing the general 17 February 2024 date from earlier provisions for very large platforms and search engines, which Article 93 applied from 16 November 2022 for a narrower obligation set.

What to check before you rely on it

This is an editorial checklist, not legal advice: confirm which ad placements run through a covered platform's interface, since that triggers the platform's Article 26 duties rather than the publisher's own; confirm whether any independently operated first-party ad server discloses sponsor identity and targeting as its own policy matter, since the DSA does not require this outside covered platforms; and confirm any audience-targeting directed even through a platform avoids the special categories Article 26 restricts.

• Which of the site's ad placements are served through a platform subject to Article 26, versus sold and served directly?
• Does any targeting parameter used, even indirectly through a platform, rely on inferred special-category data?
• Is there a documented basis for treating any part of the audience as adults rather than minors for ad-personalization purposes?

The DSA's ad-transparency rules were built around large platforms rather than independent publishers, but a publisher distributing through those platforms inherits some of the resulting disclosure.