Value: is Your Story Golden?

Value: is your story golden?
(Photo credit: Clearly Ambiguous via Flickr)
Last Thursday I attended Producers Go Digital hosted by Digital LA at the ioLA incubator. The panel shared a variety of insights about the realities of being a producer (some of may favorites are below). Yet there was one question I had trouble getting answered…
How do I value the worth of a story?
Most of the answers I got focused on the cost of the project. The problem is that cost does not equal value, not in digital media and not in any other industry. While it’s relatively easy to put a cost on the effort that will be required to tell a story (think location fees, salaries, equipment, logistics, manufacturing, printing, marketing), the real challenge is deciding if the value of the story is great enough to warrant all that cost.
One formula for value: D.U.S.T.