It is well known that coupling a single emitter to metallic structures modifies drastically its fluorescence properties compared to single emitter in vacuum. Depending on various parameters such as the nature of the metal or the geometry of the metallic structure, quenching or intensity enhancement as well as radiative processes acceleration are obtained through the creation of new desexcitation channels. The use of metallic random structures gives the opportunity to magnify the effect of the coupling by strongly confined electromagnetic fields. A gold film at the perco-lation threshold is an interesting illustration of that effect. Here, we study the influence of the method used to realize these films through two different examples. First, we show that the mean size of the gold clusters constituting the film depends on the deposition method. Even if similar optical properties (in particular far-field absorption) are exhibited by the structures, crucial differences appear in the fluores-cence of single emitters when coupled to the two kinds of D. Canneson · S. Buil · X. Quélin () · J.-P. Hermier Groupe d' random gold film. Especially, we focus our attention on the creation of desexcitation channels and show that they are cluster size dependent.