Because conveniently several of them are Google properties. If their sites weren't top 10, but top 20, then we would see the top 20 sites exempt.
Aside from YouTube, I don't see any other Google properties in the list.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/...
My point is that they are building html5 versions of many of their sites (like Youtube, probably the biggest site supporting html5). Why would they care about serving the old flash versions of those sites to their html5 browser?
I agree that they have not moved all of their properties in lockstep over to html5. But I think Youtube supporting html5 provides more information about their motivations than the number of domains they are putting on the default whitelist.