Plenty of webmasters do not link out for selfish or strategic reasons.....

... but the web is all about linking.  That is why they call it "the web".

I link out a lot.  I believe that it makes my pages richer information sources.  I believe that it builds credibility.

If you were a visitor would you prefer a page that has no links or the same page that links out to information sources, sites with great information on directly related subjects?  Which of those would be recommended more via tweets, links, likes, emails?

So, my vote is that google gives credit for linking out and even if they don't your visitors will.

Every word of content that I write on the topic areas of my business is posted on my website.

I give nothing away.

I don't want to feed my competitors and create new ones.

I have lots of articles of various lengths on my website.

I have also been improving lots of short content that was written a few years ago.

The articles that perform best are those that make a very detailed presentation about the topic and are long enough to address the most important subtopics that you would find doing keyword research.  These typically go a minimum of 1000 words and can be as long as several thousand - in addition they have many photos, sometimes graphs, sometimes data tables or a video.

These long articles rank well and get LOTS of long tail keyword traffic.  Think about it... there are a large number of different relevant words on the page and I addressed all of the major keyword topics for the subject area.

Years ago I tossed up a lot of short pages that have 30 to 50 words and a photo about a topic, then a couple years later I upgraded them to a couple hundred words and a couple photos, now I am making them 1000-3000 words and 6 to 12 photos.  With each improvement rankings improved and long tail traffic exploded.

I don't break the long articles into several pages - that would kill a lot of the long tail keyword combinations, the article would not be as impressive in presentation, and don't you hate clicking through those long articles that span a dozen pages that are very slow to load?

Even if the article is monetized on the basis of pageviews I believe that the improved rankings and traffic will make up for the pageview loss.  Plus the increased sharing will be a bonus.