The utter disaster of TanaCon, a poorly organized YouTuber fan event hosted by personality Tana Mongeau and thrown opposite of this year’s VidCon, has caught the attention of just about every YouTuber and fan, including VidCon creator and former CEO Hank Green.
Green, who stepped down as CEO last August, left a YouTube comment about the situation on a Shane Dawson video, below, about the event, which includes an interview with a tearful, apologetic Tana. In his post, Green called TanaCon “terrifying.”
“Running events is hard,” Green said. “Making them safe and fun is hard. Watching the event that Good Times put on devolve into a dangerous situation was not fun or pleasant for me or the VidCon team. It was inexcusable and terrifying and we’re all lucky it didn’t go much worse.
“I heard a lot of people joking about that, that we were sipping champagne and laughing or whatever, but no. Our head of security said to me, ‘This is like watching all of my nightmares happen in real life.’ It was scary and I was frustrated and sad and angry and following it on social media like everyone else. I think this is bad for all YouTube conferences.”
Mongeau’s relationship with both VidCon and Green is fraught. She explained in a previous video that although she was invited out to VidCon in 2017, she wasn’t a “featured creator.” This meant she wasn’t allowed in certain exclusive areas and didn’t have security around her. Fans bombarded Mongeau while she was walking around and, according to her video, led VidCon’s security staff to take measures she didn’t agree with, like not walking around the convention floor or hotel lobbies where other featured creators were staying.
“If I were running an event that was based upon creators meeting their fans, and the entire premise of your event, where the entire mission statement of your event is where creators and fans can finally meet, if this creator shows up with millions of followers and hundreds of people are there ... why wouldn’t you just print another stupid little fucking badge,” Mongeau said in the anti-VidCon video below.
Green said that he takes full responsibility for what happened at VidCon in 2017, and offered an apology to Mongeau and her fans. The full comment is below:
In 2017, I 100% screwed up. Tana was part of our content, and not making her a featured creator was a bad call. If we were going to have her doing content, she should have been a featured creator. We were being conservative because of some things that Tana had done and said in the past [including her use of a racist expletive in previous videos, as well as telling another creator, iDubbbz, to kill himself on Twitter, but we should either have had or there or not...not that shitty in-between thing. This isn’t the first time we screwed up, and it won’t be the last. This is a hard business, and I’m not saying “Oh, Tanacon is all my fault!” but I think it’s important to recognize when we make mistakes regardless of the mistakes other people made.
It’s been really hard for me to say all this because I love the team of people who puts on VidCon and they are so great and it was really hard to admit we screwed up while the VidCon team was getting attacked on social media.
TanaCon’s production company Good Times Productions, which Mongeau has called out as the culprit behind the event’s failure, is reportedly giving full refunds to those who paid $65 for a ticket to the event. Customers have to get in touch via email and specifically request one, however.