Magma Brings a New Way of Discovering Online Videos

Online videos are a huge success, with viewer numbers and content growing month after month. Their biggest drawback, in fact, is precisely their success as, with the millions of new videos created and uploaded every month and roughly 15,000 hours’ worth of video added to YouTube every day, it's almost impossible not to miss out on a great number of them. This is where Magma comes in, a new video aggregator site that just came out of private beta.

“Today marks a big day for Magma — our website is now officially open to everyone. Sign up now if you have not already,” the blog post announcing the launch read. “We owe a large thanks to the nearly five thousand beta users. Their wonderful suggestions and feedback were invaluable during our three month beta period. During that time, we have collected over 65,000 videos, millions of rows of video statistics, and tons of great feedback on what people want to do with the site.”

The site, now publicly launched, has a clear focus: to allow users to easily discover and watch online videos. The videos themselves come from a variety of sources, like the popular YouTube and Hulu and other video sites like Vimeo or Dailymotion. They are ranked depending on how “hot” they are, with a score between 1 and 11, depending on several factors like how many links they get and how much traffic they generate per day. However, they are also ranked based on external sources, like Twitter or Facebook, and the rating system manages to do a better job of bringing up the best videos than YouTube's popular video page, for example.

The homepage features a lot of videos from various sources, like video sharing sites, aggregators like Twitter and Digg, and even news sources like the New York Times. Still, despite showing more than one hundred videos in just one page, the site doesn't become overwhelming, having a clean design and a clear focus on the clips themselves. For now Magma looks like it has all the makings of becoming one of the most popular ways of discovering new videos online.