The reason top YouTube content is so good is because creators have spent many years honing their skill and building relationships. That can’t be easily replaced and I also must say that the revenue of College Humors’s Dropout service is an indication of a lost opportunity for YouTube. If done in larger amounts, it could be death by a thousand cuts. Plenty of reason to come to the negotiating table.
Okay, I think you are now making what seems like a different argument, and I agree to an extent, but only an extent.
Top brands -- like College Humor -- are never going to be happy on YouTube forever. The cream of the crop cannot be kept happy forever. If CH decides they'd rather keep 100% of X ad revenue instead of smaller-percentage of Y ad revenue, and that the math will work out in their favor, they're gone, and there is nothing YouTube could do to keep them. After all, why should CH work as serfs on YouTube's property when they can be lords of their own?
There are very, very few people who can make the math work, given the expense of supplying streaming video (which fortunately, CH has been doing themselves for a very long time already) and building/keeping an audience, etc, but there will always be some.
And yet, to my point, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering. There's no way for YouTube to keep 100% of all video revenue, and it's possible that enough popular YouTubers acting in concert via collective action might figure out how to extract slightly more from YouTube, but most popular YouTubers are making more money from Patreon than YouTube themselves, and YouTube is still a big enough player that they can afford to wait out quite a few high-profile defectors, most of whom will come limping back after things turn out to be harder elsewhere than they expect.
Google knows what percentage of time is spent on big high-profile YouTubers vs mid-range and lower. I suspect the long tail is very, very long indeed. A Logan Paul might want to believe he's crucial to YouTube's success, but I don't think he's more than a tiny blip.
