Boulder's metro area is around 330k - not quite "small town". That 100k is people inside one of the local government boundaries of the area. The US Census considers 5k to be the upper limit of a small town.
That said, agreed with the GP - places like Boulder, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or New Orleans are places that we know about through culture and are internationally recognised, while being much smaller than Australian cities. That's mostly a factor of a huge amount of English-speaking media being from the US.
Australia attempts to counter this through laws requiring a certain quota of Australian content in the media, but that hasn't really worked - and is one of the factors which spawned many Australian reality TV shows.
I visited Edinburgh a couple years ago and was blown away by the city and its people. God, everyone I met was so funny and interesting. But it’s almost never depicted on tv, outside of the occasional BBC crime drama or something. And those usually don’t get much air time outside of the UK. Peaky blinders has done an amazing job telling some of the history of Birmingham. I want more of that! The world is just so big and interesting. Far bigger than Hollywood will ever bother to portray.
You might have heard of Aberdeen I guess. But have you heard of Geelong in Australia?
American here. Literally the only thing I know about Stoke on Trent is that Messi would struggle there during a cold rainy night.