The thing about local blogs is … unless you live in a city, you likely don’t know it exists.

The only reason I know of Gothamist LLC was because of their Toronto blog - Torontoist.

So with that in mind, I’ve been amazed at how established some local blogs are.

While reading about Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks (to be honest, some of them were small-fry), I saw that Gothamist was mentioned. It was slightly confusing - the revenue says ‘monthly average of $50,000 to $60,000 over the past 12 months’, yet the first line says ‘estimated monthly revenues of $250,000′ But - with an estimated 7,000,000 pageviews a month (I don’t think even Yelp manages that), $250,000 a month sounds right.

Or to rephrase it - a local blog network that covers 14 cities generates roughly $3,000,000 a year. Hell, this would be a smart buy for a Yellow Pages company or a media company.

Next we have b5media acquiring Level9. Level9’s most popular blogs are their Starked blogs - which cover NYC, SF, LA, and DC. While the blogs veer into a broad category (eg NYC covers media, LA covers Hollywood, etc), the blogs still publish local content.

As an aside, JLA Ventures, the people behind Zip Local, are the investors behind b5media.

Lastly, we have Mediabistro.com purchased by Jupitermedia (the guys behind internet.com) for a cool $23 million. One of their most well known blogs are the Fishbowl blogs - covering NY, LA, and DC. Except they focus on media matters rooted around each city. And with only 600,000 unique visitors last year - they must know how to monetize the sites well.

So - three local blog networks, all kicking ass and taking names. Gothamist’s numbers are impressive, and Mediabistro got a nice buyout. How come we never hear about them from local analysts?