The planning behind Fyre Festival, broken down by the numbers
The Fyre Festival is the debacle that keeps debacling.
On Wednesday, Vice News released new information about the behind-the-scenes planning, or rather lack thereof, that went into Fyre Festival, speaking with former employees who worked on the festival as well as venders who were involved with the event.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the entire process was one big mess. Led by entrepredouche Billy McFarland, Fyre Festival organizers blew way too much money on Instagram models, didn't start real planning until way too late, and also didn't pay half the people they contracted. In short, Fyre Festival's catastrophic failure could have been seen coming from months away.
Based on the Vice News report, here's a breakdown by the numbers of exactly what went down during the planning of Fyre Festival.
1. Two months before the event: Fyre Festival organizers actually started to seriously plan the festival.
2. Five months before the event: Fyre Festival was announced on Instagram.
3. Six months before the event: McFarland came up with the idea.
4. 10: number of models in the now infamous Fyre Festival promotional images.
5. $20,000: base amount that all social media influencers were paid to promote the festival.
6. $250,000: amount that McFarland paid Kendall Jenner for a single Instagram post promoting the festival.
7. 1: number of social media posts about Fyre Festival that had been tagged as an ad. The Federal Trade Commission requires promotional posts to be labeled as such and now those influencers who didn't are facing a class-action lawsuit.
8. Three months before the event: when Fyre Festival organizers were forced to seek out a second round of investments due to a lack of funds. The money, of course, had gone to the aforementioned influencers and models, as well as blowout trips to the islands that apparently occurred every other weekend.
9. $500-$2,000: how much people actually paid for their tickets to Fyre Festival. Previous claims of packages purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars were apparently all gross exaggerations, possibly propagated by festival organizers themselves in an attempt to appeal to potential investors.
10. $8.4 million in land on Black Point island: what McFarland claimed he had been given for the hosting the festival and promoting the island. In actuality, the island was not private as it was advertised and the festival location was actually an abandoned development site.
11. 40,000 tickets: the number of tickets organizers expected to sell by March 31.
12. 20,000 tickets: a revised number of tickets organizers expected to sell.
13. 28 days before the event: when the restauranteur that was supposed to supply gourmet catering for the festival cancelled after not being paid.
14. $100 million: the amount on the lawsuit that has been filed against Fyre Festival organizers.
Christine is a Web Culture Intern at Mashable. She has previously written for FanSided and Saturday Down South. She has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from Hunter College. Before she started writing, she worked in education as a teacher and school leader for four years. Her special talents include being able to quote The Office on command, playing non-stop Overwatch for hours, and composing only the wittiest of Tweets (her own opinion).
