Chances are, if you’ve been on Netflix or Hulu in the past few months, you’ve heard of Fyre Festival, the failed music festival that swindled employees, investors and ticket-buyers out of millions of dollars. If you haven’t checked out one of the documentaries about the event already, I highly recommend that you do.
In this post, however, we’re going to be talking about another event that left people with severe buyer’s remorse: TanaCon. Here’s the breakdown of the failed convention in Anaheim, California that is now being called the “Fyre Festival of the YouTube Community.”
Since the initial reaction after the failure of TanaCon, there have been a few developments. More than a month after the event, Tana finally released an hour-long apology and explanation video — a video for which she faced extra criticism for monetizing (a.k.a. allowing the video to have YouTube advertisements from which she would receive monetary gain).
Eventually, refunds became available to event-goers, though a class action law-suit is still being considered by some.
Good Times Live has since transitioned from live events to digital content, changing their name to Good Times TV and charging $7.99 for subscriptions (although what content they actually have remains a little ambiguous).
I’m not sure what lessons can be learned from TanaCon: but I do know that, like in the case of Fyre Festival, allowing inexperienced people to plan a large-scale event in a crunched period of time is, has been and always will be a terrible idea. When you have a 20-year-old YouTube star and 21-year-old self-proclaimed “event specialist” try to plan a large convention in three months, bad things are, inevitably, going to happen. Was it fraud? Who knows. But it was definitely a recipe for disaster from start to finish and, unfortunately, the TanaCon event-goers paid the price.
There’s definitely a lot more to this story than what I’ve been able to cover here, so I encourage you to check out the links below for more information and first-hand accounts.
And now I leave the question to you: do you think that TanaCon was just mismanaged, or was fraudulent activity at play here? Leave your opinions in the comment section below.
Party Post-Mortem 