Awards are meaningless, unless given meaning. That meaning can be found in many different ways.
When it comes to the Hugos (the award that I know best), there is a definite monetary value to the award. For Kameron Hurley, the
Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2014 was worth $13,000—that's how much the Worldcon exposure and the "Hugo Winning Author" on the cover was valued in her advance for her next book. And that wasn't even for a best novel Hugo.
There is also a huge soft value in the networking that an award can give, if handled correctly by the recipient and the people handling the award. The value in self-esteem or self-worth is also not something to sneeze by, in seeing your name in the same list as Robert A Heinlein, Ursula K Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, Lois Bujold, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
But 90% of all awards are meaningless. In the field of written science fiction and fantasy you have the Hugos at the top, then a big leap to the Nebula, and then comes a whole lot of nothing. Awards like the Sidewise, the Tiptree, the Locus, or the Arthur C Clarke have strong niche followings and can cause plenty of discussion at times, but are basically meaningless for boosting an author's career—and those are well-established "midlist" awards.
The Nobels have value in another way: it's the one of the strongest ways that advanced popular science can reach a wide audience. The short introduction to the background of each prize is one of the highlights of the Nobel ceremony, and sent live on Swedish television. It is one of the few ways that science journalism is allowed to both make headlines and dig into the nuts and bolts of scientific discovery.