It's fun to spy on the advertising strategies and expenditures of other companies.  Keywordspy.com lets you do just that. It was introduced to me today by Semantic Web authority, David Siegel.

For example, I noticed that unlike most Ruby on Rails development shops, which spend nothing to attract new business, the old-school development shop, Art & Logic (artlogic.com, founded 1991) is spending more than $1400 every day, mostly on keywords designed to attract new customers. That means they are spending something like $400,000 per year just on search engine marketing (SEM).  This suggests to me that they are somewhat desperate and/or passing a lot of advertising expenses on to their clients. 

On a similar note, keywordspy.com suggests that Ruby on Rails developer, Pivotal Labs, stopped their SEM to hire new staff after November 2009.  When they were doing SEM, they were using it to hire more staff, not get more business. Presumably getting more business was not a problem, or at least not a mass market proposition for them.  And possibly either their need for new staff, or any troubles they might have had getting more staff went away after November.