Question 1: VAT

Where a foreign company pays you a share of advertising revenue, you supply a service to a business abroad. When that business sits elsewhere in the European Union, the VAT shifts to the recipient: you invoice with a reference to that shift and report the turnover in the recapitulative statement alongside your return.

Where the payer sits outside the Union, the service is located there too and stays outside Dutch VAT. Check the counterparty's VAT number through VIES (the EU's online check of business VAT numbers) and keep the proof.

Question 2: withholding at source

American payers apply a standard 30% withholding while a residence form is missing. For recipients in the Netherlands the treaty takes that rate to zero, and the mechanics sit in US withholding. On a channel with an American audience this is the largest single line on the statement.

Question 3: reporting

Purely advertising-based income stays outside DAC7 (the EU rule that makes platforms report their sellers to tax authorities), because the platform there sells advertising rather than brokering your sale. Your bank still reports in the ordinary way, and foreign balances travel to the tax authority through the worldwide exchange of bank data. The overview sits in what platforms report.

The monthly routine

  1. Download the statement, book gross turnover and platform fees separately.
  2. Record turnover at the exchange rate of the payout date.
  3. Keep the residence form current and diarise its expiry.
  4. Move 35 to 40 per cent of each payout to the reserve account, as described in banking.

Once the revenue sits inside a BV (besloten vennootschap, a Dutch private limited company), one more decision follows. A multi-year lower customary salary agreed with the tax authority, combined with borrowing up to €500,000 from your own BV, saves roughly €18,000 to €20,000 a year in the growth phase. Once advertising revenue becomes structural, that arrangement is usually the next decision on the list: how creators pay less tax.