I haven't thought this one all the way out but here goes.

I have had way better success monetizing YouTube videos over Adsense on my own sites.

I know you can link to a YouTube video, but can you create "backlinks" ( with anchor text and all) to your YouTube videos just like your own sites?

How would the Google animals ( Pandas and Penguins ) handle that?  Penalizing YouTube ( for a ton of backlinks) would be like eating their own young, wouldn't it?