• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 5, 2010

Jay Adelson has stepped down as CEO of Digg after five years to pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities. Digg founder and public face Kevin Rose will replace Adelson as chairman and acting CEO.

The move comes just weeks before Digg is expected to launch a new version of its social news service. It also follows on the heels of former Digg Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser leaving the company last month to join AOL as head of marketing for consumer applications.

In a statement posted Monday on the company blog, Adelson said he was "ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next twelve months" as the economy rebounds from a deep recession. He also explained that the timing was right for his departure now "with the new Digg getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing, our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup phase." He said he would continue to serve as an adviser to Digg.

In a separate statement, Rose called Adelson "a great friend and mentor" and said the company was "super busy" with the redesign and delivering Digg apps for the iPhone and Android platform. With the relaunch, Digg no doubt hopes to regain some of the luster it's lost in recent years to the likes of social media rivals like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook in particular has become an increasingly popular way for people to share news .

Rose himself is an investor in Twitter as well as hot social location properties like Foursquare and Gowalla. Injecting new life into the company he helped start in 2004 will be a key test of his leadership. The company declined to say whether Rose might be a permanent replacement for Adelson.

To boost revenue, Digg last year began building a nationwide sales force and introduced Digg Ads, a new display ad unit that mimicked news items on the site and allowed users to vote them up or down. The company said last fall that after four months, Digg Ads had average click-through rates of 1% compared to its typical 0.08% rate. Because of the new ads, the company boosted its 2009 revenue projection by 300%.

But Digg's traffic has continued to decline in recent months, according to comScore. The site had 12.2 million U.S. monthly unique visitors in February, down from 14.5 million in October. Based on internal measurement, Digg says it has worldwide traffic of 40 million.