The InsideHook Guide to YouTube

What is YouTube to you?

For me these days, it’s a streaming service that competes with Netflix and Prime Video. It’s a manual that helps with DIY projects around the house, from my top-mounted microwave to my water heater. It’s a pronunciation guide before my trip to Italy. It’s a buying guide for everything from cars to whiskey. It’s even a voter guide for local elections, hosting videos of candidates that will likely never pass 1,000 views but provide necessary context for races that are decided by fewer than 100 votes.

In other words, YouTube is essential to my life. I doubt the founders, who launched the site 20 years ago this coming February, ever dreamed it could wield that level of power. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t; as Jesse Will notes in his examination of the past and future of YouTube, it was originally conceived as a dating platform. Today, YouTube is the second most-visited website in the world, behind only Google.

To mark two decades of a site that has become essential to our lives in so many different ways, we’ve put together The InsideHook Guide to YouTube. Over two weeks, from October 7 through 18, we’ll be publishing over 20 stories about the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant. We’re focusing on how the platform has become the online epicenter of learning, and thus profiling eight of our favorite creators in eight different categories — from cocktails to cars to travel — and compiling niche guides to these same hobbies, with all the channels you need to know. And because YouTube is all-encompassing, we’re also diving into the facets of its dominance that most interest us, like how the site forever changed the celebrity interview.

There’s lots to read, and even more to watch, so I’ll let you get to it. But remember, they don’t call them “YouTube rabbit holes” for nothing. — Alex Lauer, features editor

By Jesse Will

Early next year, YouTube will turn 20, and the platform has more gravitational pull than ever. As you read this, more than 500 hours of content are uploaded to the service every minute. It’s no longer confined to shaky video watched on a computer screen; YouTube is being swiped through on smartphones and binged in living rooms, as people around the world collectively watch over one billion hours of YouTube content on their TVs every day. This summer Nielsen reported that YouTube accounts for 10% of TV viewing time, beating giants like NBC, Netflix and Disney.

How did a scrappy video-sharing site become the world’s dominant platform for entertainment, learning and everything in between?

More on YouTube’s 20th Anniversary Coming Soon…