Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on).

It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).