I am two weeks behind on this post so I will post two this weekend: One today Saturday and one on Sunday.
So I’ve been missing going to anime conventions and earlier this month, a convention was held in Southern California at the Ontario Convention Center called Animanga. Now I didn’t go to Animanga 2021 nor have I been to any of their past events so I don’t have first hand experience of this event. But I have watched a lot of vlogs from this event as well as seen a lot of my friends posts. Majority of the feedback for this event were negative and it mostly seems to be because of how overcrowded it was.
I’m actually working on a video going in depth as to why this happened but in this post, I want to share my final theory as to what happened. This is actually straight from the script for this video.
Animanga had planned and expected to be at the Fairplex Expo Center in Pomona, CA. This was where Animanga 2019 was held, where 2020 was supposed to be held, and where they were planning to hold it in 2021. If you don’t know, the Fairplex is a very large area with multiple events spaces from an expo hall to sports facilities and more. Again, I’ve never been to any Animanga event but in a tweet from 2019, they were expecting their 2020 event to use 110,000 square feet of the expo hall. I assume this is the same as their 2019 event and what they planned for 2021. This expo hall at the Fairplex alone is 20,000 square feet larger than the expo hall and ballroom at the Ontario Convention Center.
The last time Animanga tweeted that the event was going to be held at the Fairplex was April 17, 2021. One month later, after only tweeting one more time about ticket prices, on May 18, 2021, they tweeted out that they are moving to the Ontario Convention Center. This was because the Fairplex was still going to be used as a vaccination site during the time of the convention. After trying to find a new venue then contracting with Ontario, Animanga only had half of May, all of June and all of July to downsize the event to a smaller venue. I think this is where a lot of the problems originated. They probably already sold all their booths and artist alley tables and sold way more tickets than Ontario could have held. You can see that after they announced that they were moving to Ontario, there was one tweet sharing the ticket prices and one retweet sharing family tickets from an Inland Empire Yelp twitter account. They basically avoided advertising ticket sales as well as artist alley and booth sales after the change.
The event was doomed the moment they had to move to a different venue.
Anyways that’s just my thoughts on what happened. Hope you all enjoyed the read and I will be posting again tomorrow!
