Life Magazine to Downsize, Cut Ad Rates : Media: Monthly publication will also reduce circulation guarantee in effort to cut costs and attract more advertisers.

Life magazine will be printed on smaller pages starting with its July issue and will slash advertising prices in May by a whopping 35% in a bid to make the monthly publication more appealing to advertisers.

The magazine will also reduce its circulation guarantee for advertisers by 12% in July to 1.5 million copies from the current 1.7 million, mainly by shipping fewer copies to independent distribution agents.

Publisher Nora McAniff said that smaller pages and the lower circulation guarantees would cut the magazine’s costs.

The new pages, which make Life the same size as Fortune but bigger than the news weeklies, should draw in advertisers who don’t want to create ads specifically to fit the current Life page format, she said.

The ad rates are being slashed by nearly three times as much as the circulation guarantee to send a message to advertisers that Life “is ready to go, we want your business,” she said.

The rate for a full-page, four-color ad will be cut to $49,500 in May from the current $76,605.

Ad pages in Life fell 5.6% to 532 last year from 1991, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Pages were up about 2.3% for the year at the 150-plus major consumer titles tracked by the trade group.

Managing Editor Daniel Okrent said most readers probably won’t even notice the slight decrease in page size.

Life has been published in an oversize format since it began a monthly schedule in 1978. Since February, 1989, the magazine’s dimensions have been 10 inches by 12 inches; they will be cut to nine inches by 10 7/8 inches.

It will still be larger than weeklies like Time and Newsweek, which are eight inches by 10 3/4 inches.