Back in April, YouTube personality, Tana Mongeau made a video and spoke up about what was wrong with VidCon (which is a yearly YouTube convention) and why she would no longer be attending.
She mentioned things such as her problem with security and the fact that they had told her she would be a Featured Creator but then they did not come through and proceeded to kick her out of an event she had been invited to.
Fast forward to June 22nd and TanaCon is born. This was supposed to be her own version of VidCon, except all the creators attending would be able to have a voice and show up to panels and fans would have the chance to meet them. Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly as some would have hoped and here is what went wrong.
Firstly, fans ended up waiting for a long time just to get into the event, despite having their badges with them and tickets ready. Despite having bought Meet & Greet badges, fans were not exactly guaranteed to meet whoever they have gotten the badge for, it all depended on how many people the building was allowed to have.
Some of the creators that had been invited to attend panels at TanaCon ended up not being able to really spend time there because their schedules with VidCon (which is something that is usually planned months in advance) conflicted with TanaCon.
After some time the people that had been waiting in line for 5 hours were told to leave because having 20,000 people in a place that is not equipped to hold that many people is a fire hazard, so they ended up paying a bunch of money and they did not even get to see anything they wanted. Fans began to chant “refund” and the whole scene turned out to be very chaotic.
Overall, the event was very disorganized, it was simply a ballroom with not much to do. Creators were not walking around meeting their fans, there weren’t any kind of activities or food, and the merch was too expensive.
Now, it is not to say that Tana’s idea was a bad one because it was not. It is simply that they should have given themselves more time to plan out this convention so everyone could enjoy it, not because you are upset because a YouTube convention did you wrong. Conventions such as VidCon and Playlist Live were not built in a day. Sure, they have their faults and many people end up not going because of expenses. But these events are very well organized and for the most part, fans end up meeting the people they paid to attend. If this event ends up happening again, hopefully, it is carefully planned out and it has better intentions other than being upset about a convention.
