DollarShaveClub.com Will End TV As We Know It
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DollarShaveClub.com Will End TV As We Know It

Ben Thompson looks at Unilever's acquisition of DollarShaveClub.com for $1 billion and sees in it the seeds of destruction for massive consumer products companies like Proctor & Gamble. And because companies like Proctor & Gamble are the source of ad revenues that keep most television on the air....

Note that metric: cartridge share. According to the traditional way of measuring marketshare Dollar Shave Club only has 5% of the U.S.; the discrepancy is due to the massive price difference between Dollar Shave Club and Gillette. And yet, the price difference is the entire point: in a world with good enough products (Dollar Shave Club imports their blades from Korean manufacture Dorco) that can be bought on zero marginal cost websites and shipped to your home directly there is no reason to charge more.

The implications of this go far beyond P&G: fewer Gillette razors also mean less TV advertising and no margin to be made for retailers, who themselves are big advertisers; this is why I argued last month that the entire TV edifice is not only threatened by services like Netflix, but also the disruption of its advertisers, of which P&G is chief.

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