Quote:Dartz wrote:Well, not nobody. Bronycon started out as a local NYC convention in 2011, with just around a hundred or so people. They're now expecting around eight to ten thousand for this year's con, down by Baltimore, I believe. It grew ludicrously fast, but it was grown.
I wouldn't call it a bursting bubble. Maybe a lot of individual bubbles being burst.
It's more that people are looking at the big longrunning ones and thinking that they have to have all the things the big cons offer - and if they do all that they'll get the big audiences straight off to pay for everything. Nobody's really growing an event, they're just kicking in at the start and hoping to begin big. Nobody really wants to grow a con anymore - They forget most of the Big ones started as Locals.
The first convention I attended had maybe 300-400 at most, over the whole weekend. It wasn't just a year-1 con, it was Con 1, the first of it's kind. It started in a Student Union building too, hijacking various campus rooms for events. People forget that even the monster Otakon started with just 350 members - and it's taken 20 years to get as big as it has. While the ComicCon events have such a massive advertising push behind them to make them happen.
It's not a Convention bubble bursting, as much as it's peoples expectations for their new con vastly exceeding reality, then being brought down with an expensive bump when it fails. Nobody has reasonable expectations for starting out anymore.
There's also Youmacon, a Detroit anime con, which started in 2005 with around a thousand members, and grew to around fourteen thousand attendees for last year's con.
Drawncon started off last year with around a hundred guests, IIRC, and I know they needed to find a bigger venue, closer to Boston, for this year, so there's another.
It is more of a selection bias, I think, as you are far more likely to hear about a con trying to go too big, too quickly and goes bust, than one that is successfully growing, but hasn't reached the national level yet.
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