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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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