The Failure of TanaCon Highlights Why Streamers Should Outlive “Internet Celebrities”
Ill-fated event speaks to a disconnect between the interactivity audiences crave and the distance Instagram and YouTube stars require.
Failed, ill-planned live events are something of a historical theme, on the internet. From the of sisyphean slow-motion collapse of Dashcon to the utter disaster that was the famous Fyre Festival, when an event organized and hyped on social media turns to disaster, it becomes a part of web lore, one of those in-jokes that everyone keeps dipping back to on Reddit or Twitter. It gets memeified.
Those notorious misfires were joined, this past weekend, by TanaCon, an alternative to VidCon organized by YouTube and Instagram celebrity Tana Mongeau in response to what she describes as a negative experience at the former event the previous year. Mongeau wanted to provide a different experience, one where every creator in attendance was treated equally and fans could have more organic access to the celebrities they came to see.
That’s a noble goal, I think, and one that speaks to how traditional “celebrity events” tend not to take advantage of what makes internet stars so appealing to their audiences. Vidcon is, by design and necessity, a highly controlled environment. It costs a lot to attend, and when you arrive, you’ll find somewhat traditional experiences. The creators you came to see will take part in panels, they’ll be interviewed on stage and take pictures with queues of fans; it’s the sort of programming you’d expect to find at any comicbook or film convention. Safety is paramount, and, to maintain it, interactions between fans and creators are deliberately manufactured.
Manufactured moments, though, aren’t what “influencers” and internet celebrities are known for. Spontaneity and authenticity lie at the heart of these creators’ appeals, and forcing them into the traditional environment of a convention without intentionally setting different expectations can lead to complications. VidCon has learned this first hand, with moments like the ill-fated Logan Paul scavenger hunt reinforcing that, if you don’t put firm standards in place for what creators and their fans can do, you’re going to have a bad time.
Which brings us back to TanaCon. Mongeau wanted her convention to be the sort of place a fan could see their favorite creator just walking around the show floor, where you could meet them, have a conversation with them. That’s just not reasonable, particularly in an already overcrowded space packed beyond expectations. These stars and their fans want to be different from traditional celebrities, to be more accessible, less mysterious, but when your appeal is strong enough that you can attract 15,000 fans who are willing to camp out in the hot sun for hours on end, when it can drive them to rush through security barriers and overwhelm security, that buffer between you and your fans is clearly not a privileged affectation or a luxury. It’s necessary, whether you’re an Instagram star or a movie star.
It’s important to also remember, the guest list for TanaCon wasn’t filled with Twitch streamers, it was YouTubers and Instagram personalities, people whose fans don’t get to regularly interact with them through their content. You can’t chat, live, with your favorite YouTuber. You can’t put your name in their mouths mid-stream as a reward for a tip or donation. Real interaction, for them, is rare, so the appetite for it was particularly strong. Put it all together, and you get an unsafe situation. There’s a reason that VidCon is still working so hard to be both things, a traditional, safe environment that still manages to leverage new, rising personalities in novel ways built upon a sense of closeness. You have to learn those lessons, to keep improving, while always making sure your creators and attendees are safe. It only takes one disaster to shut down the entire enterprise.
In the long term, I think this is what’s going to make streaming more sustainable than simple “influencer celebrities.” There’s a real sense of interaction between streamers and their communities, and it creates a stronger sense of kinship, a more powerful sense of authenticity. That appeal will, I think, stick around, as the distance other creators must put between themselves and their fans transforms them more into traditional celebrities. Streamers already interact with their audiences, every day, just by nature of who they are and what they do, all from the safety of their own computers. Fans still want to meet them, still go to conventions to see them live, but, when they do, there isn’t the same sense of chaos because that line of communication between streamer and audience is already open.
If accessibility and interactivity lie at the heart of the space’s future, then streamers will continue to hold this advantage over more traditional celebrities from platforms like YouTube and Instagram. The latter might feel new, might seem like a completely novel form of celebrity, but, they bigger they get, the more they transform into the same sorts of sequestered stars we’ve seen for decades. It’s the livestreamers, the Twitch and Mixer creators, who can maintain that sense of closeness, that authentic appeal, and long term, it’s going to make their platforms much stronger.
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