

Content farm firm Demand Media files for IPO - omarchowdhury
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/demand-media-ipo/

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byrneseyeview
It's hard to measure their profitability, since normal accounting doesn't
capture how they work. The money they pay for content should be considered an
"investment," and expensed over the next few years, not all at once. An
article they create today will probably still be getting visits in five years.

I would love to see their expected future traffic, and current cost, for the
content division. What you might see then is that a piece of content costs $X,
and earns $.75X... then $.75X next year, and the year after, and so on.

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byrneseyeview
Spoke too soon:

 _[W]e have paid substantially all of our freelance content creators upon the
creation of text articles and videos, rather than on a revenue share basis,
and we capitalize these payments._

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keltex
I think this is a push by the investors to cash out. It boggles my mind
(according to techcrunch) that they have $355M in financing. They are heavily
dependent on organic search results that a re-balancing of google's algorithms
could squash them.

What happened to IPOs for profitable companies, anyway? Even Facebook (which
IS profitable) is going to wait to build their revenue and profit further
before their IPO.

