Google sets up £52m fund to settle French publishing row Google's Eric Schmidt, left, and French President Francois Hollande sign the agreement at the Élysée Palace in Paris Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/AP Google will help French news organisations increase their online advertising revenue and set up a €60m (£52m) fund to finance digital publishing innovation, settling a dispute over whether the internet group should pay to display news content in its search results. The agreement, announced on Friday by the French government and Google, will give the news organisations access to advertising platforms on the internet search leader. European publishers losing money and readers had asked governments in France, Germany and Italy to make Google pay. The company threatened to stop indexing European news sites if it was charged for the content. The company said that the settlement means it does not have to pay for "snippets" of news content that appear on a Google search page. France had appointed a mediator to lead negotiations with French publishers and they called the deal a "happy conclusion." Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, was present at the Elysée Palace with President François Hollande to sign the deal after what the president's office said were "intense negotiations." "Our search engine generates billions of clicks each month, and our advertising solutions - in which we have invested billions of dollars - help them make money from that traffic," Schmidt said of the deal on the Google blog. The commercial agreement will allow media organisations to profit from Google advertising platforms, including AdSense and AdMob for mobile phones. Google sends some 6bn clicks a month to publishers around the world, representing a big money-making potential by selling advertising next to it and drawing in new readers. Clicking on the ads generates revenue that will be shared. It was not immediately clear how the revenue will be split, but most was expected to go to the French publishers. The growth of search engines as a way to find information has affected news organisations around the globe, and France is seeking to protect its own media groups and what they produce. In October, Hollande discussed with Schmidt a possible plan for a new tax that would make search engines pay each time they use content from French media. However, Google threatened to bar French websites from its search results if the tax was imposed. Germany is considering a similar law, and Italian editors have indicated that they too would favour such a plan. Whether the French deal could serve as a model elsewhere remains to be seen. In December, Google ended a six-year dispute with a group of French-language newspapers in Belgium, reaching agreement on a business deal based on advertising as in France. The publishers had said Google had no right to post links to their articles on Google News without payment or permission and won in court. The parties later agreed to promote each other's services by placing Google advertising in publishers' media. The Digital Publishing Innovation Fund is aimed at helping the transformation to digital publishing by supporting work on new projects to help publishers go digital. Google has been in trouble in France over other issues, including Street View, its mapping service. Google acknowledged that vehicles taking photographs for the mapping service in several European countries also collected data from unencrypted wireless networks. In 2011, French privacy authorities fined Google €100,000 for collecting personal data from wifi networks - including emails, web browsing histories and online banking details - from 2007 to 2010.