The internationalization of US Internet portals: does it fit the process model of internationalization?

Although the theory of the gradual internationalization of firms has been widely studied and supported by researchers, very little is known about the internationalization of electronic commerce firms. This study conducted a case study on Yahoo! Inc., AOL, Lycos, and AltaVista. Spearman correlation and Kendall’s tau analyses along with two proxy psychic distance indices were deployed to investigate whether the gradual internationalization theory can be applied to electronic commerce firms. The results reveal that the gradual internationalization of Internet firms is better supported by the sociocultural distance index than the cultural distance index. Some implications of findings are also discussed along with other characteristics of the internationalization of the Internet portal firms.