TL;DR: If you can convince millions of people to test which topics are interesting on a platform you control, you can tax those topics when they become popular. Welcome to Twitter’s real business model.

If I tell you that I’m going to build the next Facebook, your skepticism isn’t around whether I can assemble a technical team to do so. Your skepticism is likely due to a far more uncertain part of my plans: Will anyone care? Attention is the most precious commodity in an information-flooded, short-cycle-time world because once I’ve captured your attention, I can ask you what you want. This is precisely why crowd-backed funding, from Kickstarter and Indiegogo all the way to Kiva and AngelList, has flourished.

Attention is the new barrier to entry

At the dawn of the web, there was a sense of utopia. Digital storefronts meant the end of market behemoths. The Internet would launch a million businesses, and the Long Tail would prevail. Fast-forward a dozen years, however, and it’s clear that’s not true. Frictionless digital markets and networks actually concentrate attention in a few big companies. Anita Elberse’s book Blockbusters provides a sobering counter-argument to Chris Anderson’s Long Tail.

The most profitable business strategy, she says, is not the “long tail,” but its converse: blockbusters like Star Wars, Avatar, Friends, the Harry Potter series, and sports superstars like Tom Brady.

Enter the attention monopolists.

More than just good branding

Strong brand recognition has been an advantage since word-of-mouth reputation found its way into broadcast media. But there’s something fundamentally different about companieslike Twitter, Facebook, Google, Foursquare, and LinkedInthat are part of our digital nervous system. Because they enjoy network effects when they coalesce attention around something, they have a unique advantage. They can tax that precious attention once it’s grown.

Attention extortion

Consider Twitter’s advertising model. Its microsyntaxhashtags and RTsemerged from users, as they colonized feeds and sought ways to better channel attention around a message or a subject. Twitter waited until it had millions of users before trying to monetize its business.

Because Twitter isn’t just a media platform, but rather a platform for testing and then coalescing attention, it can go beyond simple ads. It can literally extort those who’ve captured attention, taxing the way they reach their audience. Twitter’s letting a competing event invade the attention O’Reilly has created, and the audience it’s assembled.

If a company which gathers an audience wants to maintain that audience, it has to pay to do so. It’s a brilliant business model for an attention age. Millions of users are furiously testing the zeitgeist, creating themes that gather attention, and a resulting audience, atop your platform. When one of the topics in your digital petri dish grows big enough, you can sell access to that audience in the form of an auction. At its core is the concept of a self-organizing, self-identifying tag. Hashtags are emergent, unstructured, and often messy. But they serve as a pointer to audiences.

What should Intrapreneurs do?

First, build the attention tax into your business models

If your idea takes flight, you’ll have to pay for the audience you convene. That’s a simple fact, but it should mean that you adjust your cost of customer acquisition upwards.

Second, think how you can convene, instrument, and tax audiences

Figure out how you can be at the center of signals your market generates. The real value of service models is the perpetual insight you get into usage patterns. Finally, build products that convene audiences. The hashtag is a great example of something the consumer creates that the convener can then leverage. What’s your industry’s hashtag? * [full disclosure: I help run @strataconf, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer in this battle.]