Is the era of the $12 magazine subscription coming to an end?

Condé Nast, publisher of titles like Vogue and Vanity Fair that are wildly expensive to produce yet cost subscribers as little as a dollar, is betting its future that the answer is yes.

The company said Friday that its consumer marketing chief, Robert A. Sauerberg, would become president, assuming a newly created second-in-command role to the chief executive, Charles H. Townsend.

The senior-level management shuffle signaled what executives said would be a fundamental overhaul of the advertising-based business model that has sustained the publishing giant since S. I. Newhouse Sr. bought it in 1959.

“We have been so overtly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very risky model as we emerge from the recession,” Mr. Townsend said on Friday. “In a company like ours where 70 percent of our margins are generated on the advertising side, we must develop a much, much more effective financial relationship with the consumer.”The goal of the overhaul, is to transform Condé Nast into a business that relies less on advertising revenue and more on the income it makes from charging consumers to read its products on both digital and print platforms.