| 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. 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 the next two weeks, from today through October 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 trying to whittle down the 20 best viral videos from the last 20 years. There’s lots to read, and even more to watch, so I’ll let you get to it. And remember, check back tomorrow for more… — Alex Lauer, features editor | 