Because it says in the article that several of their businesses are producing lots of cash, just not growing.
This is not to defend the business, I have no interest in doing so, but the ONLY thing about this that is even reasonably a cautionary tale is building a business that has no intrinsic value to anyone. Those businesses have little chance, but that's the point they're making when they declare it a cautionary tale.
I do have an interest in defending the business, because I work for DM, specifically engineering an analytics platform for Pluck.
DM has a reputation on here as some sort of shitty content farm, but that's just a fraction of what we do. Maybe that's just the only part of the business the markets care about.
At least for my group, sales rings the dinner bell announcing a new contract frequently enough that it's driving engineering insane. They need to move that damn thing over by marketing.
This is not to defend the business, I have no interest in doing so, but the ONLY thing about this that is even reasonably a cautionary tale is building a business that has no intrinsic value to anyone. Those businesses have little chance, but that's the point they're making when they declare it a cautionary tale.