That's definitely true. The grandparent poster was referring to Patrick's top-ranked comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599181 , which dealt mainly with how amortization of Demand Media's acquisitions requires them to amortize each acquisition's costs as a quarterly charge over the next ten years. A similar point is made by John Batelle in the Wired article, and is another reason why non-GAAP measures like EBITDA that exclude amortization are widely used.

This doesn't say very much about whether Demand Media is profitable once you exclude amortization, but it is an important thing to consider.