That's exactly the point; I don't want them to know I am reading.

The lack of analytics is a good thing. It's none of your business what I read, you already have it in your server logs that I've added your feed to my reader. I do not wish to feel like a tool and an asset of some company simply because I want to read an article.

A lot of sites have "solved" this nonissue by not including text in their feeds, instead only providing a link to the article on their site. A quick and easy way to make me unsubscribe immediately.

Can't you track who subscribes to the RSS feed, because of that polling you mentioned.

RSS is trivial to monetize, there are other reasons why Google/FB killed it such has having to educate people first, or not wanting to promote a free standard that would have not allowed them to monopolize the market

Some readers support pubhubsubbub or whatever, so no polling is required, if the site uses it.

Does everything need analytics?