I don't think this discussion is getting at the root of the problem that some people seem to be concerned about. Currently, the auctions are definitely not getting the traffic that they would have otherwise gotten had they still been posted in the Classifieds section like they were before (I'd wager good money that this is the case). The fact that the 'What's New' link gets the most page views informs us of exactly that; it gets the most page views. This is not the same as getting the broadest visibility however, although it's easy to conflate the two. The 'What's New' page views are primarily generated because of people clicking on the lightning bolt or having it set as their home page. But the majority of them are generated by the same (relatively) small subset of users, most of whom have high post counts and just generally enjoy browsing the forums for whatever content grabs their attention. Basically, these are the people engaging with others, BSing and just generally spending time on the site. However, that doesn't imply that the majority of users also click on the 'What's New' link. It just means that the 'What's New' link is the one that gets hit most often (BGinGA alone is probably responsible for some non-negligible percentage of those page views). That link might generate 5% of the views on PCF, but that 5% is probably made up by 0.5% of the user base.
What brings the Classifieds section so much traffic is the fact that the majority of members here who visit the site with any degree of regularity (most of which do not post very often) are subscribed to the Classifieds section; getting email alerts, browser notifications, and web alerts every time a new post gets made. While we see these alerts, the page views aren't generated just by us seeing/reading them. They are only generated if we choose to click on the link that takes us to that specific listing. For a typical classified listing, thousands of members would have received an alert without generating page views, all of whom choose whether or not they want to visit that page. The challenge that the listings in the new Auctions section are currently up against is that those listings (I assume) won't be seen by someone unless they are subscribed to and receive alerts from this new section (or if they happen to stumble upon it by clicking on the 'What's New' link). I would bet money that the overwhelming majority of users here don't even know it exists yet. It could take a really long time for subscription adoption of the Auctions section to catch up with the Classifieds section (certainly many months at least, possibly years). I didn't even know about the Auctions section at all until just a couple days ago, and I'm fairly active member. If it took me this long to land on it, how long do you think it will take the >1000 members who primarily just use the site for the classifieds section to find it? Eventually, people will find it and subscribe to it just like they do the classifieds section, but they have to find it first, and for someone who doesn't spend a lot of time browsing the site (most users), that's not easy to do.
I had a few random racks of chips that I was planning to auction off this week (which is how I discovered the new section), but once I realized how it was structured, I changed my mind and ended up just listing them in the Classifieds section instead because I didn't think the Auctions section would get enough traffic.