Summary

  • For one historical period, the record held three figures: 31.8 million, 62.6 million and, after a later methodology correction, about 37.3 million.
  • The General Court upheld the Commission’s 2023 designation on the record available at the time. Termination in 2025 left a live dispute over the duties imposed before it.

The European Union’s 45-million threshold looks like a ruler. Stripchat’s case showed it behaves more like a measuring instrument whose settings matter.

Technius Ltd, Stripchat’s provider, reported an average monthly number of active recipients (AMAR) of 31.8 million for September 2022 through February 2023. The Commission later used 62.6 million unique monthly visitors from the same analytics source. A corrected method then put the estimate for that old period at roughly 37.3 million—below the legal line. In October 2026, the General Court dismissed Technius’s challenge to the Commission’s December 2023 designation as a very large online platform (VLOP).

The three figures belong to one service and one reporting period. Their spread comes from three measurement choices: what counts as an active recipient, how desktop and mobile visitors are deduplicated, and whether to apply a bounce-rate percentage after those filters.

The original calculation is the part worth slowing down for. Technius told the Commission that Similarweb estimated 67,010,749 monthly visitors. Deduplication removed people using both desktop and mobile, leaving 62,083,244 unique visitors. Technius then applied a bounce rate of about 49 per cent and subtracted 30,304,161, arriving at 31,779,083.

The Commission’s figure was 62,621,379. It had used Similarweb’s deduplicated unique-visitor measure but had not taken another 49 per cent off it. The Commission said the source’s “unique visitors” measure already filtered a substantial number of brief or incidental visits. Its bounce rate, by contrast, was calculated from total visits. Put that rate on top of the unique-visitor figure and the same kind of visit can be removed twice.

The Commission tested that boundary with Similarweb. It asked how “visits” and “unique visitors” were defined, and whether the unique-visitor measure already filtered bounced visits. The General Court found that the Commission explained its method and why it rejected Technius’s. The Court also noted that the platform had not supplied another reliable count of users who had not made a bounced visit. The regulator did not have to invent a third formula to satisfy a request for a lower number.

Technius also argued that the DSA was legally uncertain because no act prescribed one calculation formula. The General Court rejected that point: the law gives providers enough guidance on “active recipients”, and providers must choose a reliable method. Flexibility left the platform with a job before any regulator arrived: define its metric, keep the evidence and be able to defend the choices.

A later correction entered the record in August 2024. Technius presented a corrected Similarweb estimate of 37,270,950 for the same historical window. That is below 45 million. The Court did not use it to grade the December 2023 decision retroactively. It assessed that decision on the facts and law available when the Commission adopted it. The corrected data and method were not then part of the information categories the Commission could use under Article 33(4) of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The calendar then split in two. On 27 May 2025, the Commission terminated Stripchat’s VLOP designation and repealed the 2023 decision. The VLOP-specific obligations ceased four months later, on 28 September 2025. The General Court nevertheless found that the old decision had produced effects from 22 April 2024 through 28 September 2025. Technius therefore kept an interest in having its challenge decided. The Court heard the case in November 2025 and dismissed it the following October. It awarded no damages; it ordered Technius to pay the Commission’s costs.

Stripchat’s status and the 2023 decision’s legality were separate questions. A service can fall below the threshold later, lose its designation, and still have a live dispute about the period when the designation imposed duties. The Commission’s current supervision page lists Stripchat below 45 million and records the termination. Separately, the Commission opened DSA proceedings concerning protection of minors on 27 May 2025 and published preliminary findings that included Stripchat in March 2026. That is another enforcement track, not a resurrection of VLOP status.

The Commission used the provider’s commercial source, asked how its metric was built, and explained why it preferred one calculation. The judgment records that chain of reasoning.

The 45-million line becomes a legal switch through choices about period, activity, denominator and method version. Here, the Court accepted the Commission’s path. The next threshold dispute will turn on whether the record names the period, defines “active”, identifies the denominator, logs the method version and preserves a route for the affected service to challenge each step. Otherwise a percentage arrives dressed as certainty, and the same visit disappears twice.

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