I just happen to have some data. As of now, the total of all USD trades since the start of mtgox:
5,872,449 trades
50,541,892.44 BTC
$1,416,389,568.96 USD
MtGox charges a 0.3% to 0.6% commission on both sides of trades depending on the trader's monthly volume. So at 0.3% minimum, revenue would be:
151,625.68 BTC and
$4,249,168.70 USDup to near double that. The real money is in the BTC, valued at over $15m now if they didn't liquidate them.
They also suffered a Wells Fargo and Dwolla account being seized - when you do the numbers, they might be able to afford it. There was a period of reduced fees after the hack/outage also. This is just for the USD currency, other currencies are traded separately.
They have a large staff to pay too, $30k/yr * 10 employees?
BTW repeat of this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117478.0Pretty good analysis.
Their Top 4 employees...
The CEO, CFO, and top 2 engineers...
Have a market value > $500,000...
And NONE of these people are taking big pay cuts.
So you start with that...
Add office, power, bandwidth, hardware, software, security, accounting, legal...
Then you add massive compliance administration beaurocracy...
My guess...
Gox breaks even on the fees...
But makes a millions on private transactions and market manipulation.