“January books with very early closes have always had a problem,” she said, “made worse this year by the fact that clients are slower to approve their budgets and that perhaps there are clients that are cutting back.”

While January issues are rarely bulging with ads, December issues are, as marketers try to reach holiday shoppers. But the Condé Nast magazines that published combined December-January issues, including Cookie and Condé Nast Portfolio, did not do well either. Cookie plummeted 45 percent to 93.2 pages, Portfolio fell 35 percent to 72 pages, Domino was down 26 percent to 60.9 pages, and Teen Vogue declined 29 percent to 105.4 pages.

“Some of the advertising they carry in luxury goods, certainly in the automotive arena, without being able to look at the numbers broken out by category, I think that’s why they’re hard hit. The fashion pages are down,” Ms. Garfinkle said. “Some clients cutting back on their budgets makes it that much worse.”

Unlike other publishers, Condé Nast is known for being inflexible on ad prices.

“The problem now is that some advertising agencies have come to realize that with the unnegotiability of Condé Nast’s titles, and the broader demographic group that are associated with the more mid- and downscale brands, you don’t have to buy Condé Nast,” said Steve Greenberger, chief executive of the advertising firm S. R. Greenberger & Associates. “You can buy Women’s Day, you can buy Parents. You can buy around it.”

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But Jack Hanrahan, the former director of print at the agency OMD who is now publisher of the newsletter CircMatters, said that Condé Nast had a smart long-term strategy.

“In a negotiation environment, you’d be better off taking the hit now with regard to paging, but preserving your well-established, in their case long-term, pricing position of being equitable across advertisers and not really engaging in heavy discounting and widespread negotiations just to get a small schedule,” he said, using the industry term for an advertiser’s annual commitment to a magazine. “And you can do that when, one, you’re not a public company, and two, you have these larger bases of ad pages.”

Condé Nast is a private company, and does not report quarterly revenue, unlike Time Inc., Hachette Filipacchi Media and American Express Publishing, which are all part of public companies. Mr. Hanrahan said other publishers regularly offer heavy discounts to advertisers.

Condé Nast’s is “a fair approach to pricing and not this ‘I’ll do anything to get a schedule,’ which others do  and, I think, have paid for it,” Mr. Hanrahan said.