It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.
In a sense, I am slowly preparing for a variant of that event now by archiving items I wanna keep using youtubedl.
I can't honestly say youtube disappearing won't have an impact, but it will not be the end of the world even I won't get to archive all the items I want. Something will replace it. And if it doesn't, that is ok too.
For me personally it wouldn't matter too much if YouTube would be gone. I think I have several days or even weeks I don't use YouTube at all. But I agree for alot of people the entertainment factor (and for some the educational one) would be hugely broken if YouTube went offline.
Personally I would be fine too. But there is a lot of information which is not written down anywhere online, but exists on YouTube. This is anything from conference talks, to people showing how to use or fix some equipment/machinery. And it seems that informational content is getting more and more video centric. So there is a long tail of valuable information there, I believe.
as an avid youtube junkie, I mainline it right to the jugular several times a day, and if it went away maybe I could finally find the time to tackle my ever growing todo list
For a little bit of time. Vimeo, etc. offer readily available alternatives, there are some open source initiatives to improve availability, and frankly VOD is a commoditized service these days. So YouTube going away would impact a mostly-not-connecting ad channel, and savvy creators that preserved their videos and farmed emails will survive without too much hiccup.
I can't honestly say youtube disappearing won't have an impact, but it will not be the end of the world even I won't get to archive all the items I want. Something will replace it. And if it doesn't, that is ok too.