Smaller channels constantly outranking me

Seems like youtube decides even before my upload, that does it want to rank my video or not. I get ranked for the first 3 minutes, then suddenly the ranks drop and never recover (unless very rarely).

Then i see smaller similar channels outranking me all the time, they have fewer views, my thumbnails are better than theirs and title is almost the same.

I havea high ctr and retention of over 50%, but they still are outranking me.

What is this all about? I don't understand and it drives me crazy. I have watched the competitor videos and in my honest opinion the videos are not better than mine.

The only other thing I can think of is they might have better SEO than you, or better CTR/watchtime

youtube doesn't care about Subscriber count from what I have seen, what about the length of the videos?

or obviously as @Russ Thomas mentioned, their CTR/watchtime is better than you

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/similar-niche-authority.1233743/

Look at that thread, it might be what they are doing. Additionally, I've found that something similar to that is being done, with old channels that were monetized, possibly ages ago, but did not have any videos. (at least when I looked at them) No idea how that is done, though.

Kingsmarque said:

youtube doesn't care about Subscriber count from what I have seen, what about the length of the videos?

or obviously as @Russ Thomas mentioned, their CTR/watchtime is better than you

Click to expand...

length is the same on my niche (music) so 2-4 minutes usually