[chetanahuja]

At a conservative average of $40K pa per employee

Well that's extremely conservative. I don't know whether you speak from personal knowledge of Norwegian market but I can tell you that it's about 1/4 of what a intermediate/senior level engineer in the bay area would make. In fact it's about at the level of what a senior engineer (from a top level school) in India would make.

[blowski]

It was very conservative (although I guess not all Opera employees are senior engineers). I was trying to make the point that there's no way Opera can be profitable from just selling search engine traffic. The open accounts show that they spent around $25M on salaries in Q4 of last year.