Show runner Lance Fensterman blogs:
At least 64,000 people attended New York Comic Con this weekend. We have more details to pour through from retailers and on site tickets sales, but as of tonight we know that at least 64,000 attendees were in the building over the weekend. That’s an intense jump from 49,000 last year and it seems to say this crazy little party we call New York Comic Con continues to grow as fast as a speeding bullet.
Stay tuned for final numbers in the next few days.
Fensterman is also interviewed at ICv2:
We tried to build in common space near the back of the exhibit hall that gave you a little bit of breathing room. At one point I was watching with Public Safety, because I wanted them to be involved in the process, and we all felt pretty good. We put a 20 foot aisle down the middle, which helped. But then at the busy intersections around some of the major booths, it was very tight, but when you looked at the floor as a whole, and you looked around those edges and in those common space, you could see carpet, and that’s the most important thing.
I didn’t hear too many issues of overcrowding. Exhibitors want it to be very busy but not so busy they lose control, and no-one gave me feedback that they felt that way, so I was very pleased with the traffic.
Fensterman doesn’t really address the panel room mess, but that was a sidelight to the overall success of the con.
“…and it seems to say this crazy little party we call New York Comic Con continues to grow as fast as a speeding bullet.”
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Somebody stop that person before he or she writes again.
That is a bad line to end all bad lines. Remember, close to 10,000 people of that were exhibitors and professionals. Exhibitors pay to attend through their booth fees, also.
Speaking as someone who organized one of the panels affected by the panel room mess, I loved that problem. Our panel was on the history and current resurgence of fan films; go to most conventions and fan flicks get the short end of the stick–a smelly closet room, no internal promotion, and room for four people. At NYCC, we got a prime-sized room, peak-hour scheduling, and we packed it with 250+ people–about five times what we realistically expected. Seeing as I organized it in hopes of building some pre-launch buzz for my book on fan films (“Homemade Hollywood,” coming from Continuum in September), I really couldn’t have asked for a better problem than too many people wanting to see what we had going on.
Can I ask a question, how do they come up with the 64,000 number? The boast half the attendance of Comic-Con but with half the days and not even half the space. That seem mathematically impossible.