a buddy of mine has some program on cnet and he wants to promote it on facebook and google. Do they give you bullshit on whitehat desktop downloads? could he directly link to the cnet donwload page or does he need an official landing page. I looked at his site and its a bit boring and dont look as good as the direct download page. Anyways let me know guys thanks
Can you share the software link? Is it a free trial? What's wrong with his site other than being boring?
Help him with a landing page in return for a share of profits when he gets people using the software.
As long as it isn't falling into this category, he should be fine.
I don't think a direct CNET page will work well (to me at least these are synonymous with fake downloads, stupid installers, etc.).
Facebook won't like anything that initiates a download without user action and I am sure they will put ads going to downloadable things under a bit more scrutiny, simply because there is more immediate potential for harm to users.
If it's clean and you abide by FB ToS though it should be fine. If the current lander looks worse than the CNET lander, I would definitely make something custom and split-test. People are skeptical about downloads unless they already know what they want and are searching for specific software for that (in which case they probably download 5 things and install 36 browser addons lol). If they are in the discovery/awareness stage, i.e. they have only just heard about this app, I would definitely try to pre-sell them on why they should use it before sending them to a download button.