When someone gains any kinds of popularity from punching-down humor, there's basically four ways they can go:

1. Stop. I assume this sometimes happens and you just never hear about it because, well, they stopped.
2. Stay the course. This is hard because of how easy Option 4 is. Seanbaby is attempting to do this with his new 1800HOTDOG site and Patreon account.
3. Keep going, but stop punching down. This is hard because punching down is easier and more likely to get and keep you an audience. As you mentioned, some people have successfully done this - but, again, you don't hear about the failures.
4. Become a fascist. Punching down and rationalizing it is a key part of it, and the alt-right is terrifyingly effective at getting someone who does at least one major fascist thing to do more of them - e.g. Ben Garrison. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/6pxm2l/udevonmartino_desc ribes_how_ben_garrison_became/ ) On top of that: the human brain just doesn't DO irony. Vonnegut was right: we are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Here's a more direct link re: Ben Garrison: https://np.reddit.com/r/forwardsfromgrandma/comments/6p8fqz/ben_do ver_for_trump_garrison_back_in_2014_the/dknndv7/?context=3

This isn’t that serious.

There’s not much “internet history” that isn’t either very dry, very ‘two idiots having a pissing contest’ or very ‘Racists being racists because internet’.

Covering real world events gives him more topics to cover.

I want to hope that SolRo is defending Louie Theroux and not Ben Garrison here, but would anyone really be surprised?

Yeah, I don't know what purple cat is saying, internet historian has always done his due diligence.
Mr purple cat what are you on about 😚

I dunno maybe I'm imagining it but I had this impression that, as time progresses, he has done a higher proportion of videos where the subject is just some general event (like this) and not specifically stupid internet drama that only cretins who hangout on 4chan and reddit and whatnot would know or care about.

eg. https://youtu.be/xtsQwicbsy4

Those videos are also amusing. Nice brief window into a particular world of stupid. But they dont have much journalistic merit.

If you watch his interview with sumito, he's pretty oblivious to why he's so popular with 4chan but he assumes it's the he will not replace us videos about Shia LaBeouf