I'm glad some people are understanding the biz side of photography and what it takes to make images.

I'm running an event photography company called Opix (www.opix.net) in San Diego. I have no idea how Brightroom or other companies do their business so I can speak only for my company. These are some quick facts:

1) Number of shooters I hire: usually 3 - 4.
2) Number of images I look thru after an event: 5,000 – 10,000
3) Number of nights to go thru #2: 5
4) Number of people who place an order: 10% or less, usually.

Notes:

#2: "look thru" means determing the race number(s) in each image. It's not always easy because sometimes you can't see. And I spend a lot of time trying to figure out them. Really frustrating. I do all of post-race steps by myself.

#3: I say "nights" because I still have a day job so I do everything at night. Needless to say, I don’t get much of sleep in that period…

In short, this is extremely time-consuming, and therefore images are priced accordingly, NOT just for ink and paper (or disk). Of course, there are many other aspects of running this kind of business, but BlueTree and others have already mentioned so I don't repeat.

Honestly, it's not so rewarding money-wise. If I were a little bit smarter, I shouldn’t be doing this business...