Rather than expense the costs on payment (like every other publishing company), they are trying to amortize it (like a machine or factory) over a four year period.
If they treat costs like every other company in their industry, they are losing a significant amount of money each year. (More importantly, in real world cash accounting, they are burning through significant amounts of cash each quarter.)
If they go public, investors who don't understand the underlying risks of the Demand Media Business (like Google changing their algorithm) or understand why this type of accounting artificially inflates profits will get burned - and it will hurt the overall technology ecosystem (much akin to the everything.com IPOs of the late 1990s)
The company loses more money than it makes. How it it gonna be big?