I don't know if you can monitor download counts or not. Both Raspian and OpenBSD have an automated way to upload feedback that you're using it. OpenBSD's at least welcomes dmesg output so they can look at what hardware is getting detected correctly. I suppose you could write something to parse those into a database.
On first boot a script asks if you want to participate, then it calls "mail" I think to send an automated email. All my stuff (except my Pi 3) is old so I never do it.
