Over the past several months, there have been several scandals on YouTube, from Logan Paul and Ricegum offending cultures on their trips to Japan and China, respectively, to, most recently, Tanacon.
Originally the idea of YouTuber Tana Mongeau, who has racked up about 3.6 million subscribers and is known for her story-time formatted videos, Tanacon was a reaction to the long-running Vidcon. While Vidcon has its own independent issues from over the years, Mongeau released a video in the beginning of April titled "Why I Won't Be Attending Vidcon 2018: A Rant." The hour-long rant of Mongeau's personal problems with Vidcon concludes with her proposing - though I doubt, at the time, that she meant it seriously - that she would hold her own convention that would be run with the fans of YouTube creators in mind. Mongeau said that she wanted her convention to be better and freer than Vidcon.
Naturally, Mongeau's large following latched onto the idea, and other well-known creators came to her support, which, in turn, birthed Tanacon. Scheduled to run concurrently with and in close proximity to Vidcon in Anaheim, California, Tanacon held a line-up of many well-known creators from Shane Dawson and Casey Neistat, to Bella Thorne and Ricky Dillon. When paired together with promised free tickets (though attendees could purchase VIP for $65 in exchange for extra perks including a gift bag and skipping lines), it seemed that Tanacon had the promise of success. Though, as Philip DeFranco cautioned in his video a day before the event, "there is the possibility that it becomes a complete sh*t show."
The next day saw 5-thousand people standing in a hot parking lot outside of the convention at the Marriott without water or food. Footage from the event shows teenage girls revealing severe sunburns, chanting for refunds, and utter chaos both in and outside the convention, stemming from general dissatisfaction with the organization of the event. Ultimately, the event was shut down as a fire safety hazard, and the following days of Tanacon were shut down.
But where did Tanacon go so wrong when so many people supported it and hoped that it would succeed? In a revealing 3-part docu-series, Shane Dawson interviewed girls who attended the event, the CEO of Good Times, and Mongeau. On the whole, I admire Dawson's series, beginning with a video titled "The Truth About Tanacon," and I applaud Dawson and his team for talking to several different parties to try and find what really happened at Tanacon, and who is to blame for the failure.
Throughout the series, behind the finger-pointing between CEO of Good Times Michael Weist and Mongeau, it is clear that there is not any one party at fault for the failure. Instead, I think the failure comes from two young people - Weist and Mongeau are only 21 and 20 years old, respectfully - who had good intentions but were blinded by their own agendas. I do remain slightly critical of trusting Dawson's word alone, as he clearly wants to help Mongeau, as a personal friend, and Weist appears only through a screen in the series, and fear that there is even a slight bias towards Mongeau.
However, Dawson makes a good point by claiming that Tanacon came out of revenge against Vidcon, and she was irresponsible for insisting that the event happens at the same time as Vidcon, instead of taking time into account. On the other hand, however, I do feel that more responsibility falls to Weist. For example, Weist claims, in Dawson's series, that he was told that the venue would be able to hold 5,000 attendees, though the maximum capacity on the website is listed as a little over one-thousand, and he signed a contract for the same amount. On the same account, Weist insists that he thought there would be 91 security guards to cover the event, though a record shows that only as many as 25 security guards were on duty at the same time.
Therefore, I can only conclude that Tanacon was the perfect storm of inexperience and poor planning. Neither Weist nor Mongeau were prepared to host an event to such caliber, and all parties involved are lucky that no one who attended was severely hurt.
