As a rapidly emerging trillion-level industry in China, the internet celebrity economy has created market opportunities for regional industries to “break conventional boundaries” and empowered rural revitalization to “advance with momentum”. From a socio-cultural currency analytical perspective, this study deconstructs the capital value attributes of online popularity and the value creation mechanisms of the internet celebrity economy so as to examine its enabling mechanisms and catalytic effects on rural revitalization and inclusive development. The findings reveal that the value appreciation mechanism originates of internet celebrity economy from the Pareto improvement achieved through intervention of celebrity capital in factor allocation of real economy operations in the digital era. The accumulation of online popularity significantly enhances the establishment probability and sustainability of local characteristic industries, with this industrial catalysis relying not on the “dominance effect” of top influencers but rather on the “long-tail effect” of grassroots internet celebrities. By empowering the establishment of local characteristic industries, the development of the internet celebrity economy in rural areas has progressively realized value transition from influencer brands to public domain traffic, as well as facilitating industrial ecosystem construction, village landscape improvement, local employment growth and environmentally friendly production. It particularly provides inclusive development opportunities for vulnerable groups such as relatively impoverished farmers and rural women. This paper establishes a theoretical framework for internet celebrity lifecycle expected returns, proposes academic perspective that online popularity should be regarded as operational factor with capital value, so as to provide theoretical reference and practical inspiration for guiding internet celebrity economy to promote rural revitalization through optimizing policy design.