Jefferson Graham

USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES —Talk about disappearing profits.

Shares of Snap, Inc., the parent company of the messaging app Snapchat, fell to its initial $17 IPO price Thursday, as investors worried about Snap's business prospects.

By mid-day, the stock was trading just above IPO levels, at $17.22 a share, but closed the day at $17 a share, down 88 cents. Snap had opened at $24 on its initial day of trading in March, after pricing at $17 the night before, and surged 44% by the close.

But investors have grown increasingly skeptical about its ability to stave off competition from Facebook's Instagram, which has copied many of its popular features. Shares rose as high as $29.44 on its second day of trading and have been falling since. By June 1, the stock was at $21.34 and has been in the teens since June 7th.

Several banks have recently lowered their price targets on Snap, including Citigroup, Barclays and J.P. Morgan.

Snapchat is an app that's wildly popular with teens and young adults for sending photos and videos that disappear within 10 seconds. It's also a platform to discover new media, used by such large brands as CNN, Wall Street Journal and Cosmopolitan.

When Snap went public in March, the company addressed that profits had yet to come, and might never come.

The offering of 200 million shares valued the company at $23.6 billion — about the size of Google when it made its public debut, but far smaller than Facebook in 2012.

The $3.4 billion sale was the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Alibaba raised $25 billion in 2014, according to Dealogic.