I was going to call this post “The Three Things You Need to Know About Why I Scratch My Expanding Ass” but I am more refined than that. 
Nevertheless, there is a Headline Bubble inflating across the blogosphere and online news and commentary media in general.
More page views are required and so more content must be created or reblogged or scraped ever more quickly.
As a result, the length editors go in order to grab attention spirals higher.
Like all bubbles, this will continue longer than rational actors envision but make no mistake this balloon will go pop.
There will also come a time in the not too distant future when the perception of bloggers who have their content pulled directly onto aggregation sites will shift from,
“great, I am getting more exposure.”
to
“no, please do not take my content and my page view from me.”
This process has already begun.