In recent years, new developments are taking place in the efforts to create a legal infrastructure for social content production, which has become widespread all over the world, including our country. In this direction, the Income Tax General Communiqué of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance Revenue Administration entered into force in the Official Gazette issue 31717.
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The regulation in question includes all social media, not YouTube.
According to the regulation named Earnings Exception in Social Content Production and Application Development for Mobile Devices, the earnings of social content producers who share content such as text, images, audio, video through social network providers on the internet and those who develop applications for mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets. Earnings from electronic application sharing and sales platforms will be exempt from income tax.
In order to benefit from this exemption, it will be necessary to open an account in banks established in Turkey and collect all revenues related to these activities especially through this account. Banks will be obliged to withhold income tax at the rate of 15 percent as of the date of transfer, on the amount of revenue transferred to the accounts opened in this context, and to declare and pay in accordance with the principles in Articles 98 and 119 of the Law.
Due to the activity covered by the exception, it will be possible to open more than one account. On the other hand, taxpayers who have opened an account in a bank or started to use their accounts for this purpose in order to benefit from the exemption will have to report their bank account information to the tax office they are affiliated with within one month.
In addition, within the scope of social content production activity, obtained through social network providers; Revenues such as advertising revenues, sponsorship revenues, donations, gifts, tips, paid subscription revenues will be considered within the scope of the exception.
Exception provisions will not be applied to the earnings of persons operating on platforms that are not considered as social network providers, such as personal websites, electronic commerce sites, news sites, etc., where interactive content is offered as secondary and ancillary services.
Social content producers, who share content on the internet through social network providers, are taxed within the scope of commercial income. With the repetitive article 20/B added, the earnings from these activities are exempted from income tax under certain conditions.