A new Business Insider report, based on a source at Snapchat, makes it appear that the up-and-coming social media service has already outpaced Facebook in the amount of media shared daily on its network, but a closer look at the numbers tells a different story.

The report appeared in a story posted at Business Insider on Tuesday - days after news broke that Mark Zuckerberg's dominant social media company offered to buy the younger network for a figure of $3 billion. (The 23-year-old CEO of Snapchat declined.) According to the report, the Snapchat representative said the company has already had more shares in November 2013 than Facebook.

Specifically, Snapchat's representative said Snapchat users send about 400 million "snaps" daily. Compared to Facebook's 350 million photos uploaded daily, Snapchat appears to be the winner.

Or at least an equal. This is where the first major caveat comes in. Facebook-owned Instagram has a user base that uploads about 55 million photos every day. Put both Facebook photo-sharing figures together, as Business Insider did in its chart, and the king of social media still comes out on top - but only barely.

But that's not where the caveats end. First off, Facebook's 350 million photos shared daily comes from a user base of over a billion users, as of the last figure released in July. While the world's most popular social media network admits to losing some of its younger demographic over the past year, which happens to be Snapchat's strongest user base, Snapchat has not released figures on how many active users it has. And there's no way there are a billion teens on that social network that have gone unnoticed.

Simply put, Snapchat is not nearly as big as Facebook, especially when you count some of the approximately 90 million monthly active users on Instagram. But we can't know for sure, because Snapchat hasn't disclosed its monthly or daily active user figures.

Another considerable caveat that could explain the difference in shared snaps-to-user-base ratio is the structure of Snapchat's system, itself. Users send a "Snap" to one or more recipients that has an auto-deletion timeframe of one to 10 seconds built in to the Snap. This, naturally, encourages more sharing of snaps, the same way you'd likely exchange more individual text messages than emails, where the size and duration of the message are, respectively, much larger and semi-permanent.

The same goes with Facebook photos: of the 350 million photos uploaded every day, most stay up, getting multiple views, comments, likes, and so on throughout their tenure on a Facebook page. Facebook is only counting uploads, not recipients (i.e., views), which is how Snapchat measures its "snap" shares.

And while Snapchat clarified to BuzzFeed that 88 percent of snaps are sent to just one person, the other percentage include multiple-recipient snap shares, which can inflate the number of shares above the likely active user base yet again.

Another little caveat in the numbers is that Snapchat's 400 million shared include both photo and video messages - something Business Insider notes. Facebook's numbers don't include video uploaded. Finally, Snapchat hasn't clarified how many shared snaps are unique, as opposed to how many could be re-sends as a result of the auto-delete on the recipient's side.

However, with all of the ambiguity, it is clear that Snapchat is popular and growing. The number of snaps shared on a daily basis has more than doubled in about six months, growing by about 50 million in the past two months alone. And the fact that CEO Evan Spiegel felt confident rejecting Facebook's reported $3 billion overture reflects on Snapchat's quite positive direction.