My experience has been pretty close to that; if I hit #1 then the peak is usually around 500-1000 simultaneous visitors according to Google Analytics, and the total number of visits is around 30-40k. Being around the middle of the front page is around 200-300 simultaneous visitors, and a correspondingly lower number of total visits; I don't know if I've ever had less than 10k total visits from a front page link.