This is a good point though I hear that written content is king from a long tail SEO standpoint.
We've done a few of these "tools" at Open Listings and haven't had much luck with them in terms of SEO but the initial mini-launch traffic can be nice and we've been able to use them to introduce our main offering to new audiences. Shitty Listings helped us find an audience in the small-time real estate investment community for instance [0]. The advice I'd give from our experience with these mini-launches is to make sure they tie in well with the larger product and make sure not to let these traffic spikes mask underlying problems with retention in your main business. Especially when you're small, it's easy for the whole team to get distracted by shiny launches and getting signups when the real growth opportunities are usually "boring" stuff like tweaking transactional emails.
Text is king for SEO because search engines have been most strongly optimized for text content. Google is much better at finding high quality written content than it is at finding high quality data visualizations.
BUT, the key insight is that there is a lot more to content marketing than SEO. In fact social channels eclipsed search engines a long time ago for a lot of content marketing programs. And cool apps/images/visualizations/games tend to do better on social than just straight text, no matter how well written.
We've done a few of these "tools" at Open Listings and haven't had much luck with them in terms of SEO but the initial mini-launch traffic can be nice and we've been able to use them to introduce our main offering to new audiences. Shitty Listings helped us find an audience in the small-time real estate investment community for instance [0]. The advice I'd give from our experience with these mini-launches is to make sure they tie in well with the larger product and make sure not to let these traffic spikes mask underlying problems with retention in your main business. Especially when you're small, it's easy for the whole team to get distracted by shiny launches and getting signups when the real growth opportunities are usually "boring" stuff like tweaking transactional emails.
[0]: http://www.shittylistings.com