What is Magma? Well, it’s best known as molten underground rock waiting to explode out of a volcano and flow viscously through your run-of-the-mill Polynesian village. But as of today, Magma is also a video site created by Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron. Baron launched the site in the hopes that it fills a need for audience-focused content. Just as TV Guide and the Billboard charts offer entry points into their industries, Magma offers an entry point into web video. The company hopes to become the new search interface for video exploration.
Says Baron, “YouTube was built to make it easy for people to upload their videos. Hulu was made to help publishers feel safe with distributing online. Facebook and Twitter are also very special to the video ecosystem but they were not designed for video. Magma was created for the audience.”
Magma provides stats and real-time tracking to help users discover the day’s most popular video trends. Each video page is assigned a rating between 1 and 11, depending on the number of trackbacks and the daily traffic. Magma also offers public dashboards for users to share their videos among friends in a feed reader-style queue. If you can’t find the video you want to bookmark, you can add an external video to the site by linking to it from Magma or via an installable browser bookmarklet. In this way, Magma is one part video community, one part Delicious, and one part buzz tracker.
It will be interesting to see if users view a Magma “collection” as something different from their group of YouTube subscriptions. As well, depending on how the community monetizes, the idea of having a channel with unlicensed external content may make for some interesting legal battles.
