Where to Find a Platform’s Real User Numbers.

There is a public user number for every major social platform operating in the EU, published twice a year under a legal duty, and hardly anyone in brand social ever reads it.

Under Article 24(2) of the EU’s Digital Services Act, providers of online platforms and online search engines have to publish the average monthly active recipients of their service in the EU, in a publicly available section of their own interface, and update it at least once every six months. The obligation took effect on 17 February 2023 and applies to every online platform except micro and small enterprises.

That gives you something a platform’s marketing page never will: a regional figure, on a fixed schedule, that you can line up against the same platform’s figure from a year ago.

Knowing where to find it, and what it does not tell you, changes how you decide where your team’s next month of production goes.

What the disclosure actually contains

The figure is an average of monthly active recipients in the EU, calculated across the previous six months.

The Commission’s guidance is deliberately broad about who counts. Anyone who engaged with the service at least once in the period is in, whether they viewed or listened to content or posted it themselves. So it is not a registered-account number, and it is certainly not a follower number.

Forty-five million average monthly active recipients is the line that carries legal weight. Cross it and the Commission designates you a Very Large Online Platform, with a heavier set of obligations attached.

The first designations landed in April 2023 and covered seventeen platforms and two search engines, among them Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube. Nearly every channel on a brand shortlist has a number attached to it.

Where to read the numbers

The law puts the figure on the platform’s own service rather than in one central register, so each one sits in a transparency or legal section on that platform’s site. Searching the platform name alongside “DSA transparency” usually gets you there faster than the help centre will.

There is a second document worth knowing about. Very large platforms and search engines also file content moderation transparency reports twice a year, while smaller services file once a year. Since a standard machine-readable template came into force in July 2025 those reports are genuinely comparable across platforms, and the Commission publishes the reports from all designated platforms and search engines together on its digital strategy site. The first harmonised round was due at the end of February 2026.

For a channel-mix decision, the six-monthly user figure is the one you want. It belongs in the same evidence pile as everything else you use when you choose which platforms are worth running.

What “active recipient” does not mean

It is not your addressable audience. It counts everyone who touched the service in a month, including people who will never see a brand post and people who arrived once from a search result.

Each platform also applies the definition to its own product. A monthly visitor to a professional network and a monthly viewer on a short video app are not doing the same thing, so lining the two totals up next to each other is a rough comparison at best.

And the numbers are self-reported. There is a legal duty behind them and a regulator who can ask questions, which is more accountability than a press release carries. Nobody independently recounts them on your behalf.

The limits, stated plainly

Four caveats, and an operator should hold all four at once.

• It is an EU figure. There is nothing in it for the UK, the US or the Gulf, so if that is your market you are reading a proxy rather than your own audience.
• Definitions vary by platform, so cross-platform league tables built from these numbers are directional, not precise.
• The figure is self-defined as well as self-reported, and a platform can change how it presents the split between one period and the next.
• Trade coverage of the same disclosure sometimes quotes different totals, depending on which line in the document it picked up. That alone is a reason to open the source.

None of that makes the number useless. It makes it evidence rather than proof, which is the correct status for almost everything in a channel decision.

The UK has no equivalent figure yet

Do not assume there is a British version of this to read. There is not.

The Online Safety Act brings transparency reporting to the services Ofcom categorises, but the register of categorised services was scheduled for the summer of 2026 and the first mandated transparency reports are not due until the summer of 2027.

Until then, UK teams read the EU disclosure as the nearest available signal on European usage and hold it loosely. That is honest. Pretending you have a UK number is not.

Direction of travel beats the absolute number

The absolute figure on its own is close to useless for a marketer, because you cannot recount it and the definition is the platform’s.

The series is where the value sits. Same publisher, same definition, same six-month cadence, several periods deep. Four consecutive falls tells you something real about a platform, whatever the exact headcount turns out to be.

A shrinking regional audience is a channel-mix signal. It is not a reason to post more.

That distinction is where most teams go wrong. Reach softens, so output goes up on the same channel, and the scarcest resource in the building gets spent defending a slot the data says is thinning.

X is the worked example

X began publishing EU data in November 2023 and the count has been falling since.

The report published in April 2025 showed roughly a 10.5% decline against the previous August, around eleven million fewer European users, with France down 2.7 million, Poland down 1.8 million, Germany down 1.3 million and Spain down one million. The second half of 2025 brought a dip of about 15%, which then held into 2026. The latest disclosure, covering the first half of this year, showed further decline, this time slight.

Now put the global picture next to it. X reported 550 million monthly active users worldwide in filings in May 2026. Third-party measurement from SimilarWeb put the platform at roughly 302 million mobile active users in June 2026, with about 123.7 million of those active daily.

Two of those three numbers point up or hold steady. The one published on a legal schedule, for a defined region, points down. A team choosing a channel on the marketing headline alone would reach the opposite conclusion to the one the disclosure supports.

The numbers brands usually decide on instead

Almost every channel decision gets made on one of three inputs, and each carries a specific weakness.

• The platform’s own marketing figure. Written to sell advertising and product adoption, usually global, usually a peak rather than an average, and published when it flatters.
• Global monthly active users. Real enough, but it blends markets with wildly different behaviour, so a rising global total can sit on top of a falling audience in the only region you sell to.
• Third-party estimates from measurement firms. Useful as a cross-check, and most valuable when they disagree with the platform, but they are modelled from panels and traffic rather than counted.

The DSA disclosure does not replace any of them. It is the fourth input, and it is the only one the platform is legally obliged to publish on a schedule it does not control.

If you want a structured way to weigh all four before you commit a team, that is exactly the work inside an audit and channel strategy.

What to check before you commit a channel

Six checks, in order, before a platform gets a permanent slot in your production plan.

1. Find the platform’s current EU disclosure and note the date it was published.
2. Pull the previous two or three periods and write the series down as a line, not a point.
3. Note whether the platform changed how it reports between those periods.
4. Compare that direction of travel against the global number the platform is promoting.
5. Ask whether your actual market sits inside the EU, next to it, or somewhere the figure says nothing useful about.
6. Decide what production capacity the channel earns on that evidence, and diarise the next check for six months’ time.

The whole exercise takes under an hour, twice a year. Set against a year of a team’s output, that is a rounding error.

What good looks like

A good channel decision has a paper trail. Someone can ask why you are on a platform and get an answer with a date and a source attached rather than a feeling.

Good teams also treat the six-monthly disclosure as a calendar event, not a research project. It lands, someone reads it, the channel review either changes something or does not, and that decision gets written down.

When the evidence says a channel is thinning, a good team reallocates capacity rather than raising output. Fewer channels run properly beats more channels run thinly, every time.

The signal is not a reason to abandon a platform overnight either. A declining regional audience can still be the right audience if it is your audience. What it should never do is go unnoticed for two years.

How NBK thinks about channel evidence

We treat channel selection as an operations decision, not a taste decision. Every channel you run costs planning time, production time, approval time and reporting time, and those costs are real whether the channel performs or not.

So the question is never “should we be on this platform”. It is “what is this platform worth against the hours it takes from everything else”, and that question needs numbers with a date on them.

The DSA figure is one of the cheapest pieces of evidence available to a social team. It is free, it is public, it arrives twice a year, and almost nobody in brand social is reading it. Small advantages compound when the alternative is deciding on feel.

If you want to pressure-test how your current channels were chosen, our social media audit checklist walks through the same questions we ask at the start of an engagement.

Next step

If your social output feels busy but not effective, the constraint is often the channel list rather than the content. Start with an NBK audit and find out which platforms are actually earning their place.