[aothman]

"Your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis" - and that's the crux of the matter entirely.

As per this WSJ article http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-demand-medi...

if demand media is allowed to amortize out their costs over years (under the assumption every piece of "How to bathe your gerbil" will keep bringing in revenue for the next half-decade) they become strikingly profitable, especially for a company that writes words on the Internet. If not, they're hemorrhaging cash.

Given Google's recently renewed focus on providing quality search results, I'd take the under on all of these companies, mahalo included.