Choosing the form

Choose video when you want to feel that a specific person looked at you, and a written review when you want detail, privacy and something to reread. Most buyers default to video because judges advertise it, but text does some jobs better, and saying which you want saves a round of back and forth.

Presence

Video wins this one outright. A face, a voice, a person visibly responding to your material in real time is most of what a clip is actually selling, and presence being the product is the reason most buyers reach for video first without being able to say why. Research backs the pull of a voice: Kumar and Epley (2021) found that interactions including voice - phone, video chat or voice chat - created stronger social bonds than text-based ones, with no increase in awkwardness.

Text has no equivalent. A well-written review can be warm and specific, but it cannot replicate the feeling of being looked at, because nobody is on the other end of a paragraph in the way a camera implies someone is on the other end of a clip.

Detail and re-readability

Text wins here. A written review can hold more specifics in the same space, because prose does not have to be sustained at a spoken pace to stay coherent, and it can be reread without losing anything. A clip watched three times is the same ninety seconds three times; a written review reread three times still gives you back detail you missed, because reading speed is yours to control and a clip's is not.

If what you want out of the commission is something you can sit with and return to, text does that job better. A third option sits between the two: an audio-only review keeps the register and the presence of a voice while dropping the judge's image entirely. The voice may be doing most of the work: in Schroeder and Epley's 2015 study in Psychological Science, evaluators rated speakers more favourably when they heard a pitch rather than read it, and adding visual cues to the audio did not change their evaluations.

Privacy

Text is the more private of the two by a wide margin. A clip carries a judge's face and voice, which is fine for most requests but is a real consideration for a buyer who does not want any video of a stranger discussing them existing on their device. A written review carries none of that; the only identifying content in the file is your own material, which you sent knowingly. An automated score is more private again, since nobody is looking at all - useful context for weighing how much presence you actually want against how little you are willing to have on file.

What drives the price

Both forms are quoted the same way: on length, complexity and register, not on the medium itself. A long, detailed scenario costs more in either form than a short honest read does. What differs slightly is where the labour sits - a clip's cost is concentrated in performance and delivery, a written review's cost is concentrated in composition, and judges who specialise in one form price their time in it accordingly.

Neither form is the cheap option by default; anyone who tells you text is automatically cheaper because "it's just typing" has not accounted for how much of a good written review's quality is in word choice done carefully, which takes real time.

Reuse and what stays yours

A clip is a file with someone's likeness in it, and what you can do with it afterward is limited by who else appears in it - private use for you, not a public repost. A written review carries none of the judge's image or voice, so the ownership question is simpler: it is a piece of writing addressed to you, and reposting a line from it does not expose anyone's face the way sharing a clip would. That is a real difference if discretion around the judge, not just around yourself, matters to how you plan to keep the thing.

Which request wants which

If what you are actually buying is a specific person responding to you, in a register you can feel, ask for video. If what you want is detail, privacy, or something you can reread rather than rewatch, ask for text. A request that says "I want to feel like someone looked" is a video request even if the buyer typed it as a general one; a request that says "I want a considered read I can keep" is a text request, and saying so plainly in the brief gets a better result than leaving the judge to guess. For a straightforward comparison of the algorithmic option against either of these, Rate Cock's own breakdown of AI versus human judging is worth reading before you commit to a form at all, and how a purely automated score is presented is a useful contrast if part of what you are weighing is a number rather than a response, and how measurement fits in if a number is genuinely what you are after is worth a separate look entirely.