Tana Marie Mongeau more commonly known as Tana Mongeau, an American internet star rose to fame back in 2018 for her “storytime” videos which gained her not only revenue but also lots of press. Mongeau gained a lot of this press negatively; however, because of the amount of controversies and backlash she faced from her past experiences. This article goes into one of her most infamous stories: TanaCon.
In 2018, she became fed up with the idea of a popular event in Los Angeles, CA known as VidCon. Vidcon is an annual YouTube convention in which YouTubers from all across the globe come together and form meet-and-greets, live displays, and marketing opportunities to grow someone’s online presence. However, Mongeau created an alternative which was and still is to this day known as TanaCon. TanaCon promised a more fan-friendly way to meet their favorite creators while still staying within a certain budget.
The hype this new alternative to VidCon was attracting was getting out of control. Word of mouth about the convention was spreading like wildfire and people were reposting on social media this new way of meeting their favorite creators left and right. The expectations that were placed on Tana were at an all-time high, and she really could not afford failure with this event. However, the amount of tickets that were sold through Ticketmaster was astronomical, and about $325,000 worth of tickets were sold over a few weeks. This got so big, in fact, that they began to oversell tickets. Ultimately leading to the venue where TanaCon was being held becoming so overcrowded that people were getting hurt.
The event itself was held at the Marriott Anaheim Suites, which was stated by the hotel to only hold around 1,000 guests. According to what Tana herself released though, they had sold over 15,000 tickets but according to the local police departments, there weren’t more than 5,000 people there. Because of the massive influx of people, the security of the event was spread very thin and was not by any means set up for an event of this magnitude. The cherry on the cake, however, was the fact that the day this was held, the people were waiting in these hour-long lines and were getting severe sunburns from waiting in the sun for so long. And because of all these factors TanaCon was shut down permanently for the duration of the time it was supposed to take place, making fans leave in anguish for having to wait in these lines for so long.
What made this situation way worse was the issues that Ticketmaster had with the refunds that were supposed to be issued to fans. Because of the amount of people who were turned away from the event, many refunds were necessary. There were tons of complications with getting money back to their owners and many didn’t receive their money until months after the initial event. This caused Tana to receive major amounts of backlash and criticism from her fans stating that she was trying to steal their money and that the event was so unorganized it was chaotic with all the factors of sunburns, returns, and the event ultimately being shut down. And also resulted in her receiving a lawsuit from the company she was partnered with.
After the initial event, Tana went into a period where she did not say anything but then came back with an official apology to everyone who had been affected by her actions, lack of planning, and the harm that had been done emotionally and physically to her fans. She also addressed the issue with the lack of security and the refund issue that her fans faced and was overall just very transparent about the entire situation from start to finish and explained the situation and how her intentions were only good to start with.
Years later as we all have grown and matured and look back at this almost historic event and think “How was this even allowed?” We can see through Tana’s actions that with the lack of understanding on how to plan an event, it’s essential to plan 3 steps ahead to ensure nothing of this matter happens again.
