Cooking Light Subscription: Cooking Light Subscription

Cooking Light Subscription

Subscribers of glossy magazines may soon find that issues are accompanied not just by two-dimensional ads, but by physical samples of those products delivered to subscribers' doors.Publishers are dabbling in subscription commerce, in which users pay an annual subscription and receive boxes filled with products and samples at regular intervals. It's one of the hottest trends in shopping -- and there's one for virtually every interest: Birchbox delivers beauty products, BarkBox purveys pet treats and toys and Blush Box offers up erotic paraphernalia.Another player, CraveBox, is targeting publishers with a white-label platform that helps them offer discovery boxes and put advertisers' products into the hands of subscribers.Subscribers can buy magazine-branded CraveBoxes for about $10 a month. The boxes will include a selection of products from a publisher's key advertisers (think a stopwatch for a health title, mascara for a beauty title) and be marketed both to CraveBox subscribers and to the magazine's audience. Kitty Kolding, CraveBox's CEO, said CraveBox splits the revenue with the publisher, though the split may vary from publisher to publisher.Time Inc.'s Cooking Light this month will be among the first to issue one. "We're always looking for new ways, especially in this climate, to curate the Cooking Light experience and deliver that experience to consumers," said Diane Oshin, the title's group publisher.