Normally at the beginning of any new year, magazines are looking for ad rate increases and media buyers are mounting their usual lines of resistance.

And so it is this year, but these days the advantage is clearly on the side of buyers, who are dismissing most of those requests out of hand.

"It's just the usual posturing," says one top Midwest print buyer.

"They aren’t going to get them. They talk about postal rates going up and the increase in the cost of paper, but they say that every year."

There will be some exceptions, says the buyer, those few hot must-have titles people are buzzing about. "Magazines like Rachael Ray’s can get what they ask for. But there really isn’t an Oprah or a Real Simple out there this year. There aren’t many magazines that can just ask for what they want. It is a very competitive marketplace."

Indeed. The magazine industry, like all traditional media, is facing increasing pressure from the internet, and the effect has been to weaken its bargaining position. The fact is that some categories of print titles have never really recovered from the ad recession that set in at the end of 2000.

Ad pages ended 2006 about flat to the prior year. And while forecasters are calling for a better 2007, it all seems very tentative. The threat of the internet is only going to get worse.

"It is not an easy time to talk about rates," observes Steve McEvoy, senior vice president of corporate sales and marketing for Hachette. "But there isn't a business today that's not going through the same thing we are."

As McEvoy observes, whether individual titles get their rate increases will often reflect how necessary that title is to a specific advertiser. The fewer alternatives that advertiser has, in terms of reaching its target consumer, the dearer that title.

"A boating magazine might be able to get a better rate out of a boating client, but the client wouldn’t pay the same for a men’s health magazine," McEvoy says. "In the same way, a prescription drug might pay to be in men’s health magazine, and wouldn’t feel it was as necessary to be in the boating magazine."

Also in a stronger position are those titles, notably the high-fashion magazines, that have less to fear from the internet. They are in themselves arresting in their design, with both editorial features and advertising that cannot be duplicated on the internet.

But increasingly among publishers the focus is on gaining a larger share of an advertiser's total ad budget, working to offset declines in magazine spending with increases in online ad dollars. Behind the most recent layoffs at Time Inc. is a longer-term repositioning of the company toward the internet, especially for its larger titles, such as Time.

It's about following the dollars.

"Magazine budgets are downshifting and going to the internet," says Steven Bloom, senior vice president and director of magazines for Zenith. "But the same amount of money is flowing into their companies. The magazine revenue is just going to different places. Magazines don’t operate in isolation anymore. They are making up what they are losing through online sales."

As Hachette's McEvoy explains it, "We aren’t just a magazine company anymore. We’re a promotions company, an internet company, a lot of different things. We go beyond the platitude of being a marketing partner, with events, online, in-store promotions, custom publishing. We are bringing things to the table that help make the discussion of rates moot."

When it comes down to rates, and talk of increases, McEvoy says those other options open up a wealth of options.

"If there is an existing advertiser looking for a break on a rate and no other way to bring them in, this sort of thing might make it easier to work with them. Let's face it, any buying agency is under more pressure than ever to bring in savings, so they turn around to the vendors, us, the magazines, and ask for them."

But that also makes for a more competitive marketplace, and a changed one for magazine publishers. Says McEvoy: "It was tough in ‘06; it will be tough in ‘07."