It's making fun of DashCon more effectively than any deliberate parody could dream of.

Shaking down teenagers has become a substantial portion of our economy. How can I get in on this action? 82000 for a ball pit and bounce castle makes the little capitalist on my left shoulder much excited.

As we've discussed before, you'll have to do a lot better than the DashCon people did if you want to turn Tumblr conventioneering into a Randian moneymaking opportunity. Even with their last-ditch appeals to altruism, the DashCon staff wound up losing a lot of money on this venture, and worse, they've ruined their reputation (which counts for a lot when you've got to compete on an open market). Unless they can find a way to turn themselves into "ironic" celebrities ("We're the Tommy Wi's of the Convention World!™") and cash in on the viral success of memes like #BallPit, they're pretty much done for. Think of them like Detroit auto czars, only without the ability to keep themselves swimming in caviar by extorting tax-funded welfare checks from George Dubya Obama.

The market's there, and there are plenty of suckers, but you (we?!) will need to do lots more planning and be much better prepared if we want to do something like this and walk away with a profit.

Well, I figured the gross based on the conservative estimates of the crowd in your link, and the base ticket price. Plus the 17K squeeze.

Do you have figures on the expenditures? How do you know they all lost money? I'm not doubting that this is possible, but given what we've seen some actual figures would make it believable. I don't think anyone got paid outside of the hotel. Perhaps Badass can comment here with an estimate of the cost of that.

I don't have any exact figures, I doubt anyone has them but the actual convention managers, but the consensus from every source is that they wound up in a major hole of shit. Conventions are expensive, and they're usually "paid" for through hotel bookings; since hardly anyone showed up, the hotel fees had to be covered out of pocket by the convention managers. The 17 grand was apparently just enough to cover the 4,000+ unsold bookings for that night, and left the DashCon staff with nothing to pay their panelists.

It's like if you're a local band, and you've got to cover a certain ticket spread for the show you're going to play. If you can sell a lot of tickets, you're fine. The venue's happy, you're happy, you might even get a nice fat bonus too. But if you fuck up and only sell, say, a quarter of the tickets you're contractually obligated to unload, the venue will squeeze you for the remainder, and you may wind up paying through the nose for the privilege of playing on stage that night. Basically, you want to own the hotel, not run the convention.

It's got to be a special hell to make one of your first major life mistakes in front of the slobbering maw of the internet.

My sympathy is limited given the tales of ex-staffers. There were tales of people being replaced based on "she has more followers than you", departments who were allowed to promise anything they wanted or try and contact whoever they wanted to be a guest, and just total ignorance of anything resembling planning. They wanted to live off the slobbering maw of the internet, they can die by it.

@homer : The lack of transparency combined with the claims of incompetence are usually the hallmarks of fraudulent behaviour. If they were honest, a great deal of the negative press could be countered simply by being open and sharing the contract they signed with the hotel. With 37,000 tools to share and distribute information, surely they could swing this? I guess the tumblr idea of community is something like North Korea?

BTW, I had no problem finding the hotel online. It would be pretty straighforward to call them and ask about the rates for a conference of the claimed size. That would pin the hotel cost and resolve the issue fairly quickly.

There have been bad conventions that were shut-down mid con even and the con chair or staff didn't start begging for donations or make loads of increasingly unlikely excuses or post "funny" pictures on their blogging site of choice while the con collapsed, they stepped up and took responsibility for the debacle.

I don't see that happening here with Dashcon where they're already talking about 2015 and few of them seem to have learned any lessons at all.

Nothing is their fault.

It's not their fault they budgeted for a 5,000 person con and only 500 people showed up.

It's not their fault that the guests expected to have their rooms paid for as per the agreement. Or that they expected to be paid at all.

It's not their fault the vendors all lost money because they were promised thousands of attendees and got hundreds.

Old white cis straight men are to blame for everything.

We'll have none of your cisgender privilege oppression here!!

I repeat, this convention, and it's results, truly define the term "social justice"

I couldn't believe this was made unironically at that point. I guess chick isn't non-binary gender-fluid enough.