I live in a fairly small (~40,000) city with a mostly blue-collar population. There are some scattered web services around the town (city hall, public library website, local art museum, local newspaper, etc.), but not a lot that's very active or professional, and no real locally-focused blogs or forums that I've seen.

I'm wondering if there might be a niche here for a city group-blog or forum site, supported by AdSense. There's plenty of local news and issues for discussion; I was thinking maybe a small group of people with original posting access to a "city-online.com" blog, that would then be open for commenting by the public (with registration). Schools, parks, business development, local recreation and culture, housing, politics, etc., all might be topics.

Has anyone has any success (from a financial point of view) with websites of this kind? My sense is that it could become popular as a site, since the market is fairly empty, but whether it would actually generate any ad revenue is another matter.

Opinions are welcome.