Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view.

Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.

I'm the highly downvoted parent that said this is possible.

It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage space a day. Which means that per month you're generating a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per month.

So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.

Is the average as relevant as some other statistical measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about? For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe?

edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading

You’re thinking of the median (the value that ends up in the middle after sorting), which is indeed more useful in such cases.

(Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)

Well, to show the video to the person who uploaded it you don't need to reencode it or push it to the edge or any of that. And I see no reason to believe that most videos are even watched by their creators.