Toronto-based Fork Radio has launched a web-based portal that aims to give Internet radio advertisers the exact number of listeners tuned into the radio station when their commercial aired.

The company says its Fork adPanel was created to combat inaccuracies in radio ratings sampling methods, such as methodological, technological and sociological errors in rating stats. The service is in a preview release mode now, available to a handful of white-listed websites, but Fork Radio’s publicity department is accepting waiting list requests. At least one major media outlet has suggested the tech should be used also to count listeners per song for the purposes of paying royalties for songs played by webcasters.

‘Radio advertising has been using sampling as the primary way of calculating how many people an advertisement has potentially reached,’ says Fork Radio founder Danny Keyes. ‘The Fork adPanel provides advertisers with real-time statistics showing how many listeners were tuned in when their commercial played.’

The Fork adPanel has been integrated into Fork Radio’s PunkRadioCast stream, an online alt rock/punk radio station. Fork Radio reports the PunkRadioCast stream draws 20 million unique listeners monthly. That number is calculated by the number of unique IP addresses that tune into the station each month. (Each time an IP logs onto the PunkRadioCast stream, it is logged once, along with the time period for which the IP is logged in. Fork Radio offers the stats in terms of who logs in for longer than 25 minutes and who logs in for less.)

Listeners arrive at PunkRadioCast via alt rock in iTunes radio, a Flash player stream (and portable media player available through other sites such as www.interpunk.com), as other media players such as Winamp and Windows Media Player and a downloadable widget that delivers the content to users who don’t visit PunkRadioCast.com.