Nothing lasts forever. If you are one of the lucky few (hundred?) who manage to make it big on YouTube and can be smart with the money you've made, you could live off of it for the rest of your life. Everyone else will need to get some sort of a job after (or while doing YouTube) to see themselves through to retirement. Maybe that's just a part time job to take care new games and fast good, or maybe it's a 9-5 with a pension, who knows.

I think there are some "gaming" channels that would be fine if YouTube happened to vanish. They are big enough and have enough of a following that they could get jobs elsewhere if they needed to. They have connections that could help see them through the rocky weather while everyone else struggled to stay afloat.

The thing about a YouTube-based income is that it's not at all steady. Maybe you'll have a good month and make $5000, then $1500 the next month, and $500 the month after that. You can take a guess at how well you'll do because you probably won't see a 95% drop in views in a 30 day period, but you never know for sure. The Adpocalypse is proof of that. Sure, the people with 10+ million views per month are fine, but what happened to the people who decided to do YouTube "full-time" just as ad rates plummeted? Shit hitting the fan is what happened.

I've seen a few channels/people talk about this, but if you run a "successful" YouTube channel, you learn a lot of things: video editing, community management, sound engineering (maybe? You make audio sound good. I'm not sure what that would be called), some sort of graphic design from making thumbnails, etc. All of those things are their own departments in larger companies. You do it all, while creating videos on a regular basis.

I've been drinking so so i'm not entirely sure what my point is. But, YouTube won't last forever. Myspace didn't. Vine didn't. YouTube won't. Maybe it will be because of Google's own choices or maybe it will be because of some new site that somehow manages to be better for both advertisers and content creators. Some might say that YouTube is already dying. I don't necessarily agree with that simply because in order for YouTube to die, there would need to be somewhere else to go, which there isn't. But that's probably a discussion for another time, though.