Just a anecdotal data point: www.ibm.com had 100k "hits" on the day of the Lotus takeover announcement (June 5, 1995) which IIRC was the peak traffic to that point. Actual people traffic was probably around 20k. A gimmick of the takeover was that IBM Communications referred media to the website.
Little over a year later we hit our first 1MM "hit" day around the second or third day of the Atlanta Olympic Games.