Well .. I just clicked through their site and got to this page:
http://contributors.gettyimages.com/article_public.aspx?article_id=2373
No word about submissions being closed. "Email us now" ... so I did

as for my initial question it also says :
"If your test submission is successful, we'll contact you within 60 days. Due to the volume of test submissions we receive we will only be able to respond to successful candidates. "
So I'm more interested in Corbis approach. In case of Getty I'm just wondering is it just their disclaimer or does it really take up to 60 days.

I send my contributor application to both Corbis and Getty and so far didn't get an answer. Been 5 weeks as far as I remember. Does anyone know if they answer only when one gets accepted, or do they send some "thx, but NO" e-mail
Funny thing is some of my images are licensed to Getty through Zoonar and other places.

I wouldn't really mind if those were used ONLY as wallpapers. The problem is that many of those images are available in high resolution and some small percentage of those downloads ends up with a commercial use. There are some 'pirate' sites with images/vectors, but most users know they are violating the copyright law. Here, with all the 'wallpaper' stuff my guess is that most people think it's a legitimate business.

Somebody posted this on the Shutterstock forums, but I guess it's worth reposting here
http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=123724
Another "sharing" site with wallpapers. Lots and lots of copyrighted images, many available in high res.
I found one of my images downloaded over 7000 times.
http://www.goodfon.com/wallpaper/235840.html

Good thing is that the earnings are calculated with the 29 cents commission, so I don't think at the moment I'm getting less than I suppose to it just shows up differently on the Sold Files page. 

The confirmation e-mails say 29 cents and in My Files - Sold Files they are all 28 cents now.

I'm 'silver' at Fotolia and I've just noticed that my subscription earnings went from 29 to 28 and 26 cents. I just checked the FAQ section on pricing and commissions and it clearly says c29 for a non-exclusive contributor. Also some of the normal credit purchases went down to something like 22.5% instead of the generous 25% I should be getting.
It's funny that in 2008 when I started I was getting more per download than I'm getting now being half my way up to gold.

Apparently the server needed some time to process all those images. Good thing is, they were all approved pretty quickly (I actually think the approval was faster than the server lag  ).
Still wondering why some of the IPTC data got lost. Any clues?

I was about to add around 1000 images to Cutcuster and encountered two issues. One is that some of my files seam to loose their IPTC data during the upload process (more or less about 10% of images). Second thing is that I have about half a thousand images 'stuck' in the FTP folder. I can see them in 'my folder' when I connect via FTP, but when I look at 'my uploads - overview' they weren't processed for some reason.
Normally the upload process would be very fast .. just submit, submit .. .and I'm done. This two issues slowed me down unfortunatly.

Yep. First I wasn't able to submit files, but the forum was still working. Now the whole site is down. Mayday, mayday USS Shutterstock is going down.

I'm in the process of choosing a site mainly as a cloud-based online backup for my pictures and videos, but with the possibility to sell my work directly (so at least the fee will pay for it self). I was wondering if anyone did a comparison of those different sites as far as earnings potential. I'm talking about sites like smugmug, photoshelter, zenfolio, avid images ... I wonder if one needs to do a lot of their own marketing to bring sales or is it possible to get some sales without any additional effort apart from uploading.

The site is still not working. Did anyone received some answers from either iStock or StockXpert?

Would it really hurt if we would all pretend that I actually made $3k in 3 days ?