Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in the third quarter, posting a loss of five cents a share. Investors had expected it to lose from four to six cents.

Revenue was up 25 percent to $85.1 million, compared to $65.4 million in the same period a year ago. Minus traffic acquisition costs, sales increased 26 percent to $78.1 million from $62.2 million.

The stock of the Santa Monica, Calif., social content company has suffered in the quarter due to worries about its traffic and growth, but it has recently bounced back after hitting all-time lows.

After losing almost nine percent today, in profit-taking ahead of earnings after a recent price surge, Demand shares rose over 17 percent in after-hours trading to $8.30.

Some more details, according to a Demand statement on the Q3 financial results:

Content & Media Revenue increased 27% to $50.7 million, compared with $39.8 million in Q310.

Traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which represent the portion of Content & Media revenue shared with Demand Media partners, of $3.4 million, or 6.7% of Content & Media revenue, compared with $3.2 million, or 7.9% of Content & Media revenue, in Q310.

Content & Media Revenue ex-TAC grew 29% to $47.4 million, from $36.7 million in Q310.

Registrar Revenue increased 20% to $30.7 million compared with $25.5 million in Q310.

In addition to its more high-profile content business, Demand also has a domain registry unit.

“We reported another strong quarter as we continue to build Demand Media’s foundation for long-term growth,” said Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO of Demand Media in the statement. “The Company is uniquely positioned to deliver data-driven professional content through its robust content publishing platform. We are now in the process of optimizing that platform while increasing our investment in video content and enhancing the quality, engagement and user experience of our sites.”

There will be a conference call at 2 pm PT today, which I will liveblog (as long as it is lively!).

Until then, enjoy the official Q3 earnings press release:

3Q11 Earnings ReleaseFINAL

But here’s the most important thing to think about: Will it help Amazon sell more stuff?

Because that’s the thing that’s truly going to separate this tablet from every other one on the market, including the iPad — it comes to us from a retailer, not a hardware company.

That heritage gives the tablet the best chance to offer Apple credible competition, and also its reason for being.

Think of all of those potential customers who have been buying stuff from Amazon for years. And all of those vendors who have been selling their stuff via Amazon for years.

We’ve seen this work once before, of course. In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle and essentially created the e-book market. Fast forward to last May, when Jeff Bezos announced that his company was selling more digital books than ink-and-paper versions.

And this one should be designed to help Bezos move more inventory, too.

There doesn’t have to be a direct analog to the Kindle and books. It’s possible, for instance, that the new tablet’s killer feature won’t be access to digital goods, but a free subscription to Amazon Prime, the service that gives subscribers faster access to the physical stuff they order.

But if there isn’t something about the new gadget that makes buying more music or movies or … something more attractive, then something will have gone wrong.

Meanwhile, here’s what we do know:

• It’s going to have a seven-inch screen — considerably smaller than the iPad’s 10 inches, though everyone expects a bigger model next year.
• It will run on a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.
• It’s going to have support from the content companies from the get-go: Amazon has at least three big magazine publishers signed on to port their titles to the device. And the company has been steadily accumulating a virtual warehouse full of video titles – not as many as Netflix, but getting closer — it will be able to stream to the tablet, too.

More shortly! Amazon’s unveiling kicks off at 10 am in New York, and I’ll be there for the blow-by-blow. Check back before then for a link to a liveblog. While you’re waiting you can read Ina Fried’s piece on potential patent issues for the Amazon tablet. UPDATE: Here you go, with the relevant details, via Bloomberg: $200, wifi-only, 30 days free Amazon Prime.

When Amazon unveils its new iPad-like device on Wednesday, it will have the backing of at least three of the big magazine publishers: Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith all have deals to sell digital versions of their titles on the new device, according to industry sources.

The notable standout, for now, is Time Warner’s giant Time Inc., which has yet to come to terms with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. A person familiar with negotiations suggests that a deal won’t get done in the next two days, either — “hopefully by the end of the year” was the guidance I got today.

Publishing sources say Amazon’s terms will roughly mirror the ones that Apple has established with most magazines this year: Publishers will keep around 70 percent of all Amazon sales, and the retailer will share some customer data with the publishers. The deals aren’t cookie cutter replicas, however, and in some cases Amazon may take a little more or less than 70 percent, depending on the title and the customer offer.

It’s worth noting that Time Inc., the likely holdout for Wednesday’s launch, has yet to completely embrace Apple’s subscription terms as well. The publisher sells individual titles through Apple’s App Store but has yet to strike a deal to sell subscriptions directly from the platform.

Industry sources say publishers have tailored some of their titles for the seven-inch tablet that Amazon plans to unveil on Wednesday, with the expectation that the company will roll out a bigger version that is closer in size to the iPad next year. Both tablets will use Google’s Android operating system.

The publishers who are on board with Amazon view their decision to link up as a no-brainer: They want more distribution channels for their stuff, not fewer. And they’ve been begging, unsuccessfully, for a credible competitor to the iPad since April 2010.

There’s no guarantee that Amazon will be one either, of course. But if you’re going to try to sell stuff, it doesn’t hurt to sell it through the world’s biggest e-commerce platform.

“You’ve got beauty and design with Apple, which we love,” says a publisher who has an Amazon deal. “But with Amazon you have marketing, and ease of use. We’re very optimistic.”

And Amazon has another compelling reason for publishers to join up: It’s already a huge partner for many of them, as a marketing platform for their ink-and-paper titles. Hearst and Amazon spelled out that relationship in a press release earlier this month, which noted that “Amazon will become Hearst’s single-largest third-party seller of print subscriptions for its magazines via digital channels.”

As physical book sales fall, publishers’ fixed costs are becoming more cumbersome. One area major publishers can cushion the blow is by keeping e-book prices higher. “If e-book prices land at 99 cents in the future we’re not going to be in good shape,” said one New York publishing executive, who asked not to be identified.

Indeed, e-book prices on many new national best sellers are higher today than they were at the start of last year.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A message which went up this month on the app’s iTunes page says its last issue was June, and directs users to try an older version of the app, which works on both iPads and iPhones. (Thanks to reader Steve Anderson for flagging.)

[UPDATE: Maintain, broseph! Maxim PR person Nora Garrity says the magazine will be introducing a new Maxim iPad app soon. This one will be brought to you by a different publishing system -- Mag+, instead of Bite Sized Candy -- but will still feature hot chicks, etc. In Garrity's words: "It will be a new app [with] the same qualities as the previous app that our readers have been enjoying.”]

[UPDATE 2: And now it's back.]

It’s not unusual for developers to abandon apps, of course. But this may be the first instance I’ve seen of a publisher bailing on an iPad-specific app. This spring, Condé Nast went the other way and dropped three magazine’s iPhone apps produced in-house in order to concentrate on iPad versions built on Adobe’s tablet publishing platform.

The advantage of an iPad-specific app is that it can be built to take advantage of the machine’s specific assets, the most obvious being its larger screen size. App developers have also used the platform as an opportunity to try super-sizing their pricing, and often charge more for an iPad app than one that works on the iPhone.

In this case, though, Maxim publisher Alpha Media is bucking the trend: It sold HD versions of its magazine for $3.99 a pop, but the remaining app goes for $2.99 a copy.

A few months back, after our staff more than doubled in size, AllThingsD launched our redesigned Web site. Today, we’re taking another step forward by launching an updated social media strategy.

You can explore the new features we’ve added by clicking the button below:

See the new features

But, before you go, I’d like to call out a few specifics that we’re particularly excited about.

The core of our expanded social media presence is the 15 new topic and category-based Twitter accounts. These new accounts — specifically about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few — allow readers to more closely follow topics and companies they care most about.

We’ve chosen to keep the main @AllThingsD account live and real-time, meaning it will still deliver all of our stories within seconds of publishing.

But readers aren’t always awake when the news they care about breaks, so the new topic- and category-specific accounts are optimized through our partnership with SocialFlow, a real-time service for social media delivery.

SocialFlow listens for when the followers of a Twitter account are active, and chooses to tweet the posts that are best. Some articles may be held back for a short time, especially those published in off-hours, although we’ve chosen settings that will keep anything from getting stale and also maximize the relevance of our tweets.

The system is designed so that readers following our main @AllThingsD account can also follow others without being overburdened by additional tweets.

Following multiple accounts just means you’re more likely to see news that is important to you.

Aside from Twitter, which we know to be popular with our readers, we have also expanded our use of Facebook.

At the main AllThingsD page, we curate and offer commentary on some of our more topical and consumer-focused stories. Clicking “Like” on any of our pages will put our updates into your news feed along with your other friends.

Finally, I’m inviting you to interact with me on the various social streams. While tweeting at me via my personal Twitter account will get my attention most quickly, I’m also available to you via Google+, Facebook and also by sending an email.

Most of all, I encourage you to click the button below. It will take you to our new subscribe page, where you can follow any of the new accounts and customize how you get your news from AllThingsD.

Again, here’s the button to get you started:

See the new features

At least that’s what worked for the news channel on a single day this spring. That’s according to SocialFlow, a start-up that specializes in Twitter analysis and distribution.

SocialFlow says that on May 25, these were the top five keywords that drove traffic from the @FoxNews Twitter account to its FoxNews.com site:

• Crime
• Casey Anthony
• Murder
• Obama
• IMF Chief

The Anthony trial dominated lots of news outlets and Twitter conversations for a few months, so it’s not a huge surprise to see related terms generating attention among Fox’s online audience.

But FoxNews Twitter followers were interested in other scary stuff beyond the Anthony trial. Other popular keywords included “boy found dead,” “kidnapper” and “global terror.”

All of this data comes from a report SocialFlow has produced that looks at what works on Twitter for several different news sites. Here’s how Fox News’s top five keywords compared to the ones that worked for the New York Times, Al Jazeera English and the Economist. (Fox News, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.)

And here’s a “word cloud” that includes more terms that worked on that single day:

The point of the SocialFlow report isn’t to draw any conclusions about different news sites’ audiences — you can do that on your own. SocialFlow is really trying to illustrate that different news sites’ Twitter audiences respond to different stuff, at different times, in different ways.

And SocialFlow says it can figure that stuff out, and then help sites’ Twitter feeds decide what and when to publish. (Disclosure: AllThingsD has recently started with working with SocialFlow for Twitter feeds like this one.)

SocialFlow is yet another Twitter-centric project from Betaworks, the New York-based investment group and start-up hatchery, which uses data from both Twitter and Bitly, the Betaworks-created URL shortener/data warehouse.

It seems to me that if SocialFlow works as advertised, it’s exactly the kind of the thing that Twitter would want to own for itself, to bolster its nascent advertising program. My hunch is we’ll come back to this one later.

At $4 a pop — via Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ Nook stores — “Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street” costs less than a single copy of the print magazine.

It’s also a bargain if you’re a fan of Murdoch biographer (and non-baseball expert) Michael Wolff, whose work accounts for 20 percent of the copy here.

In other PhoneGate news, News Corp. has told employees at its New York Post tabloid to “preserve and maintain” any documents related to phone hacking.

News Corp., which also owns this Web site, has maintained that none of the systemic voicemail hacking that has come to light at its News of the World tabloid occurred in the U.S., but investigators will be looking into the matter, regardless.

Amazon will let students (or anyone) buy textbooks at a steep discount to their print list prices, and will charge them based on the amount of time they plan to hang on to the book.

The bookseller says it will generally require a minimum rental period of 30 days, and it will allow students to extend that period at their discretion. Renters will continue to be able to access notes and highlights they’ve made in their texts even after they’ve “returned” the books.

The only surprise here is that it took Amazon this long to get into the business. It introduced the Kindle in the fall of 2007, and since then a flood of start-ups, like Chegg, Kno and Inkling, have targeted the market. Barnes and Noble already has its own e-textbook store.

But while Amazon introduced the high-end Kindle DX, aimed at the college market, in 2009, it has yet to make much headway there.