The other day I put out a challenge via Twitter & Facebook to put forth the URL of a better viral video tracker and no one had anything.
I wanted to make sure the authorities and the haters saw my challenge.
I sent out those tweets because I feel Magma is working really well in this regard, and I wondered who else is doing what we are doing. I don’t think anyone is, and so I put out this challenge. Knowing haters ganna hate I was prepared for anything, but have not heard from a single person yet refuting my claim that Magma is doing the best job at finding videos early in their rise to fame. I think its also the very best video discovery system out there, hand’s down.
Just based on empirical evidence alone, I think anyone would agree and thats why I’m putting out the challenge. Here are two neat examples that show how we do it:
#1
Mary Carillo’s Badminton Rant
http://mag.ma/mustwatch/712042
The other day I saw this video on Magma’s Must Watch. Jason Kottke apparently found this http://kottke.org/10/08/badmitton-rant
Unbeknownst to Jason, we created a Kottke channel because we think Jason has a real knack for finding videos. We took the RSS feed from his blog and set it up as a channel to look for any posts that have videos mentioned. If there is a video, we add it to the http://mag.ma/kottke channel. [anyone can set up a channel of their own here: http://mag.ma/settings/import – we did the same thing for BoingBoing http://mag.ma/boingboing TechCrunch http://mag.ma/techcrunch …all kinds of great sites. As you can imagine, if you strip out all of the videos from the CrunchGear blog, you get a pretty interesting channel: http://mag.ma/crunchgear
Regarding the video Jason found (see screenshot above), a few minutes later, it was on Magma. Then Magma noticed it was heavily passed around on Twitter and two hours later, by the time Magma found it on BoingBoing, the video moved into the top Must Watch section, eventually then hitting the Huffington Post a few hours after that and then becoming highly active around other blogs in general an hour after that. It’s also clear from looking at the history of it’s spread that the few Magma users who found this video (including myself) did not find it until it hit Magma’s Must Watch section. Though I do follow the Kottke feed myself, I don’t exactly have alerts going to my phone every time he posts a new video to his blog 🙂 But you could set that up if you wanted to, every channel also has its own RSS feed out, or you could use the open API.
#2
Love Me
“Video for the Fans”
http://mag.ma/mustwatch/711221
While the example video from Kottke is a bit off-beat, maybe even absurd, Magma is also excellent and finding the very most popular viral videos that are ultimately propelled through the Mainstream. Ju
st the other day, this video with Justin Bieber was the catalyst for sending out my tweets because I was wondering who else is doing this? Magma had this video all the way to the Must Watch section when the view count was just four thousand. We found it was hot on Twitter, then it was found on a YouTube channel, and then by the time Videogum found it, all within such a short period of time, it entered into the Must Watch. And as you can see, later, it made it through the blog charts and eventually the Viral Video chart found it last.
So I’m looking around at all of these aggregators, there’s getting to be more and more of them, and yet I don’t see anything like Magma.
Magma is many things, and its still got many more on the road map though one thing I think we have tuned exceptionally well – the best in fact – is our ability to find videos early in their rise to fame. I think our home page and the Magma Must Watch page are the best charts out there for finding the most popular videos of the day. http://mag.ma/mustwatch The RSS feed for this channel is here: http://mag.ma/mustwatch.rss
Also, see the explainer video on Magma:
http://mag.ma/minuteforce/211919
So, do you know of a viral video site that finds videos sooner?
