Want to make $276,000 a year? Start a YouTube channel

Every 60 seconds, 4,320 minutes of video are uploaded on to YouTube across its 16 major channel categories. Everything from sports and news and politics to education, entertainment and pets and animals. That's over 720,000 hours of new content every week.

But what's even more impressive is that the top 1,000 channels alone on the video-sharing site get 11.3 billion views every month, have over 400 million subscribers and are responsible for generating more than 87 social media interactions across Facebook, Twitter and the site's own comments section. On Facebook alone, each channel is responsible for (on average) 44,000 social interactions every week.

So, with such a loyal following, added to the fact that the site has 1 million content partners accepting advertising, it should come as little surprise that on average, each of these channels earns $23,000 net a month for its creators.

This fascinating research by OpenSlate, a company that monitors the value of online video for advertisers, also reveals which channels and what type of content are most popular. Of the top 1,000 channels, music is the most popular with a 25% share, and gaming is second with 20%, accounting for 27% of minutes produced each month. Rounding off the top three is comedy with 14%, just squeezing out entertainment -- TV clips and films -- on 13%.

But how YouTube and its users define a channel is also of note. The fifth-placed channel category, 'How to and style,' which accounts for 71 of the top 1,000 channels and a 7% share, covers everything from technology and computing (3%) to health and fitness (4%), fashion (14%) and beauty (64%).

So, how do you get a piece of the action? The answer is be professional. For every channel dedicated to video clips of children falling over or cats being cute, there are channels with almost television-worthy levels of investment and production values. What's more, although 23 of the channels in the top 1,000 are YouTube Original Channels, many of YouTube's stalwart channels have been building their audience share since the site launched. The top 1,000 channels upload on average 5.5 minutes of new content every minute.