Columnist pay - an idea

I was thinking today about the utter lack of brevity in most online news and magazine sites. I understand that companies do this to maximize ad space, and thus ad revenue, the same reason that a single page articles is often broken into multiple pages. I was wondering if there was a way around this menace of verbosity and it occurred to me that companies might use the hit counting tools to everyone's advantage. Since it should be possible for them to track how many hits each article generates, and since ultimately advertisers want more viewers (and therefrom more suckers) it makes sense for news sites to have a fraction of columnist pay determined by a hits/word ratio. This way, columnists are rewarded for brevity, while advertisers still pay more only for pages which generate more hits, and we as consumers get to see news and information whittled down to the essentials rather than come packaged in an armor of verbiage. What say?