> Daring Fireball has been doing the one ad a week in RSS with no tracking for over a decade. The sponsors must think they work.

I have no interest for anything sold in ads in their RSS and I assume they are tracking in the links that you click too (otherwise why spend all $11K for no results?)

> He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.

That is a good start, hopefully he should consider switching to a community supported model rather than rely on advertisers.