Magma: A Billboard Hot 100 for Online Video

August 25th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Online video is a giant sea of mostly unfiltered content. There were 11.2 billion video streams in July in the US alone. That’s a ton of video.

So how do you go about finding the best video the web has to offer? You can just watch the popular listings on YouTube, but you’re going to get a lot of Fred and Phillip DeFranco. Some companies have launched their own solutions, including eGuders (media expert recommendations) and Reddit.tv (browse top videos on Reddit).

But now the founder of RocketBoom has launched his own solution: Mag.ma, a video aggregator and rating algorithm that acts like the Billboard Hot 100 of online video.

Hop onto the website and it’s immediately apparent what you should do: watch videos. The system takes videos from YouTube (), Hulu (), Vimeo (), TED, and more. Each of the videos are ranked in terms of “hotness” on a scale of 1 to 11. All of this is done in a column-based interface to show where Magma is finding top videos.

Magma also offers users the chance to interact with the Magma charts, either by adding videos (there’s a bookmarklet to help) or by signing up and personalizing your account and channel list.

Magma helps solve a difficult problem – oversaturation of video – with a clever solution and does it with a clean but content-rich interface. It takes into account social sharing on Twitter (), Facebook (), and elsewhere to rank videos. So far, we’re impressed and look forward to hearing more about this new service.