Here's How Snap Compares To Facebook And Twitter On Its First Day As A Public Company

(Associated Press)

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel before ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, when his company pulled off a successful IPO. (Associated Press)

Snap Inc. stock's had a strong first day on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, when the company pulled off the biggest initial public offering on a U.S. exchange since Alibaba in Sept. 2014.

Shares of Snap, the maker of the popular messaging app Snapchat, closed at $24.48 per share, after reaching a high of $26.05 during intraday trading, a 44% increase from its offer price of $17 a share. Like Snap, 80% of technology companies that went public in the last two years experienced a first day pop.

Snaps' bump, however, was larger than the average increase of 34%, according to Dealogic. Snap opened on Thursday at $24 a share and closed only a bit higher than its opening price, which is not uncommon for tech stocks, less than half of which close higher than than their opening prices.

Snap's first day pop (the increase from its $17 offer price to banks and its closing price Thursday) was higher than Facebook's, which gained less than a percent during its first day of trading from its offer price. Snap's first day increase was less than half of LinkedIn's, at 109%, and less than Twitter's, which was 73%.

(Nick DeSantis/Forbes)

(Graphic: Nick DeSantis/Forbes)

It is important to note that a stock's first day of trading does not foreshadow long-term returns. After Facebook's rocky first day, which was memorably marred by a NASDAQ trading glitch, its traded below its opening price for more than a year. Twitter had a much stronger performance. Comparing that today, Twitter has seen its $24 billion valuation at IPO halved due to stagnating user counts and executive instability, while Facebook has managed to sustain continued user and revenue growth, giving it a market capitalization of $395 billion.

Snap has a great deal to prove to investors to support its $28 billion market cap. The company, which has been selling advertisements for less than three years, ran a net loss in 2016 of $515 million, which widened from a net loss of $373 million a year earlier. By contrast, Facebook had a net profit of $1 billion the year before it went public, while Twitter had a net loss of $79 million the year before its offering.

Snap's user base is smaller than Facebook's and Twitter's at the time of their respective IPOs. Snap currently has 158 million daily active users. By comparison, Facebook had 900 million users when it made its market debut at a $104 billion valuation. And Twitter had 200 million users when it went public in 2013.