How to measure the value of a research paper

Today at lunch, I heard stories of people publishing 15 papers a year, or submitting 5-6 papers to CVPR each year. That's very astronishing to me, because I can't see how an idea after less than 30 days of incubation would worth what people pay for the papers: expensive hotel, long flight, conference registration. Or maybe they are not paying all those to present their ideas, maybe they just need to prove to the outside world that they have the resource to do all that.