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"The passenger should keep his or her seatbelt fastened at all times to protect himself or herself in the event of an accident."

I was asking a friend who sells advertising about her business.

“It’s hard to swim, or even to see, with this much blood in the water,” she said.

True enough. Magazine advertising was off in 2007 and 2008. Those were historically bad years. Magazine advertising got off to an even slower start in 2009. Quarter one numbers from the Publishers Information Bureau show magazine pages off 26 percent year to year from 08 to 09.

As major magazines are decreasing page counts to deal with the economic downturn, custom publishers and the associations and corporate clients they partner with seem to be doing just the opposite, according to a new study by the Custom Publishing Council.

Released in April, the study—“A Look at the Volume and Type of Custom Publications in America”—found that the average number of pages per issue for custom publications increased last year from 22.2 to 23.2.